By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Banner of Liberty (www.,bannerofliberty.com
August 3, 2001
Even if you didn't have the opportunity to watch the House of Representatives in session it's not hard to figure out what happened simply by watching the expression on the face of Democrat leaders. You can even keep the sound off the TV and figure it out. This week they got royally whomped by President Bush, the guy they have been telling us is an incompetent bumbling idiot on several issues, the most painful of which was the Norwood Patient's Bill of Rights.
Republican Charles Norwood has been trying to get a patient's protection bill passed, and signed by a president, for six years. Five of those years he was trying to get a bill that Clinton would sign. Someone apparently got the point across to Charlie that there's a new guy in the White House now. Yesterday Norwood introduced an amendment that brought the Norwood-Dingell bill to the point that George W. Bush would sign it.
As Norwood himself put it, after listening to the Democrats, who were his dear buddies only the day before, trash him:
"I argued long and hard with almost every friend I had for four years against putting caps in the bill because we had a president who said he would veto a Patients' Protective Bill with caps."Now we have a president who says he will veto a Bill WITHOUT caps. This compromise is a simple recognition of political reality."
Norwood introduced the amendment because he realized there would be NO law unless it was more consumer friendly and less trial lawyer friendly. About 98% of the underlying bill remained the same, Norwood said. What was different was that Norwood agreed to change a provision that is critically important to Democrats. Instead of unlimited liability, which was in the Norwood-Dingell Bill, liability for non-economic damages would be capped at $1.5 million (President Bush wanted a cap of $500,000.) Punitive damages also would be capped at $1.5 million.
I called my son Guy, who is an orthopedic surgeon, to see what comment he had to the passage of the bill. Doctors have been angry for years that often THEY are sued for not providing service needed, when it was the HMO that made the medical decision. He said,
"If they can cap the liability for HMOs, why can't Congress cap liability for the rest of us? Fifty percent of the cost of a lift ticket for skiing goes to pay for their liability insurance. Ten or twenty people die in cars with Firestone tires and the court awards will probably bankrupt a 100 year old company and put many of its 105,000 associates out of business."A drunk driver in a car accident gets a $5,000 fine, but if one of my employees fails to put on a pair of gloves before giving someone a shot, even though I've provided the gloves and they are on the table, I could be fined $10,000.
We have become a litigious society. We particularly like to sue doctors, because they have been dubbed our enemy, after years of doctor-hostile bills flowing out of Congress. Only, Congress always makes sure that the GOVERNMENT can't be sued, regardless of how bad things get that they have created. This, Guy points out, is sheer, arrogant hypocrisy. Until Newt Gingrich and the Contract With America stopped it, Congress often passed bills that applied to everyone else, but exempted members of Congress. This is especially true in health care. For example, the members of Congress today who are mostly loudly attacking HMOs and claiming to be defending the "rights of patients" are the ones who created the HMO monstrosity in the first place and deliberately tried to completely destroy fee-for-service medical care. And, you will note, members of Congress have made sure that THEIR health care system is not an HMO.
Four years after he caused the death of a girl he was partying with, Mary Jo Kopechne, Senator Edward Kennedy's (D-MA) in 1973 introduced S 14, a health care bill. It included an expenditure of $250,000,000 to set up the HMOs, a bit of history that no one, especially Senator Kennedy, is talking about these days. The fact is: the HMO system that has become the villain of health care was not something that just happened. It happened because of Sen. Kennedy and those who agreed with him. It happened because hundreds of millions of your tax dollars were spent to make it happen. It happened because it was supposed to control the cost of medicine. And, it happened as a step towards socialized medicine for everyone.
Kennedy has been trying to get a socialized health bill passed and signed by a president for almost thirty years. And, in the bills he presented over the years to provide socialized medicine, once the government was the providing of those services, he prohibited individuals from suing and collecting in malpractice suits. For example, his 1973 Health Security Act, S3, prohibited "in malpractice judgments any damages to be awarded to the injured party for the cost of remedial services which he is entitled to receive under this Act."
As I watched the angry debate in the Senate yesterday over the "importance" of being able to sue and be awarded unlimited sums of money for real or imagined injury, I wondered how many people listening realized that those on Medicare or Medicaid have NO rights to sue the entity that created the problem in the first place - the U.S. Congress and people like Sen. Kennedy .
What Senator Kennedy and Bill and Hillary Clinton want is for every American to be forced into a Medicare type system. That was the intent of the Clinton Health Care system in 1993. When that failed, the great push was on to force all of us into HMOs, as a step towards herding us into socialized medicine. Five years ago many of my friends who were over age 65 were going into, or being forced into, HMOs. And, at that time they often pointed out that I should go into an HMO too, since they were about half the monthly cost of an independent Medigap insurance policy. I was not aware that millions of dollars a year of tax money was being spent to get the HMOs established and to undermine America's system of private medical care. I did know, after I reached age 65, that there was not a doctor in the town I lived in who would take a Medicare patient, unless they had Medigap insurance and many of them would not take a Medicare patient who HAD Medigap insurance. .
However, I was good enough at arithmetic to suspect that there was something seriously wrong with the HMO system that promised unlimited health care for $25 a month and was building a massive clinic. By 1999 one after another of the HMOs were going bankrupt. Suddenly, the HMO that had built the clinic announced to seniors that the company was closing the clinic and moving out of town and they had NO medigap insurance. Seniors who were paying $25 a month ended up paying two to three times that to get insurance that would enable them to have a doctor - ANY doctor - treat them.
The system that was supposed to reduce premiums and take care of the uninsured raised premiums and created millions more uninsured. When Bill Clinton announced his plan for socialized medicine, there were 37 million uninsured. Today, there are 43 million uninsured. If President Bush follows the lead of President Richard Nixon who signed Sen. Edward Kennedy's first HMO legislation, and signs the latest version of Kennedy's socialized health bill, which claims to control the cost of Insurance premiums while allowing an unfettered and unlimited "right" to sue over faulty medical judgment, the costs of insurance will go up and there will be a whole lot more uninsured Americans. Guy, a 1991 Desert Storm veteran who was the Battalion Surgeon for the Marine battalion that recaptured Kuwait city also pointed out that the lives of his Marines were valued, by laws passed by Congress, at $200,000 in case they died in action. That was the limit of the government's liability.
However, the life of a Georgia teen-ager, 17 year old Shannon Moseley, who was killed in 1989 when her GM truck burst into flames after she was hit by a drunk driver, was valued by the jury at $101,000,000. Her parents were also awarded $4,200,000 in compensatory damages. Why is one teen-age Marine worth only $200 thousand and a teen-age civilian truck driver is worth 500 times more - at 105 MILLION?
The Socialists of America believe awards like that will eventually push Americans into accepting one or another of their socialized medicine plans. And, while the Bush victory in the House yesterday was substantial, the effort in the Senate, which is now in the control of Democrats, will be to sink Rep. Charles Norwood's compromise and patient protection and pass their liability-lawyer friendly version. They expect Bush will veto it and they think that, if he does, they will win enough House seats next year to take control of the entire congress again through a loud campaign that Bush is against the Patients' Protection Act.
So, folks, don't count on the Norwood compromise becoming law any time soon. Unless, of course, a few Senators are convinced that they might lose the election next year if they DO vote against it.
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