ABOUT OBAMA'S SOCIALIZED MEDICINE --We Need Tort Reform!

Obama is trying to move too fast on health care. What we need to do FIRST is restore the economy and get Americans back to work -- and you don't do that by new taxes and new spending when you are already in debt--when you have already spent too much on bail-outs and clunkers.

In health care, they can do one thing real fast that will change the costs of medicine --tort reform. Stop making it automatically profitable to sue the health profession. Right now, too many lawyers like Pretty Boy John Edwards are making millions off of the backs of doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies with medical liability suits.

It costs so much to defend oneself in court and it is so risky because juries feel sorry for pitifully ill and disabled people; they don't care whose fault it is that a diabetic, e.g., neglected to care for himself. "Give his family a million because the insurance company can afford it and the man is pitiful. The doctor should've chased that diabetic down and made him be a compliant patient...." though it was clear he didn't want to change his eating and drinking habits, obtain and use a glucometer and come back to the office when he was told to.

So the doctors settle out of court, as it is cheaper, less risky and less public. The costs for such suits in 2007 was staggering --greatly increased over ten years before. (I'm sorry I don't have the stats; I don't recall where I read it.)

We need legislators who will reign in the lawyers. We can start by defeating Marcy Kaptur and Sherrod Brown and replacing Voinovich with a republican when he retires. Let's vote in people who will oppose the lawyers and support tort reform.

So much clerical work is done as defensive medicine. Gov't has done more than any other entity to drive up the cost of health care. Like when the gov't agency, OSHA, inspected a medical office and fined a doctor $20,000 because his staff put a sandwich on the lab counter. That's gov't confiscation of the earnings of a doctor for the careless error of an employee. $100 would have been a lesson --especially if you docked it from the employee's pay.

No, this didn't happen at my husband's office --but it is a Toledo-area story.

"God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance and have eternal life."--the Bible