Does America Need a New System of Medical Justice?
Philip K. Howard AEI-Brookings Joint Center, Washington DC, April 24, 2002 We are here to discuss a question that may strike some as radical, or perhaps naive: whether America needs an entirely new system of medical justice. I suspect that most people here don’t like what’s happened to doctors and malpractice costs in the last few decades. But most people, even reformers, have tended to assume that the system of justice is immutable, like the ten commandments. Prevailing orthodoxy is that patients, indeed all Americans, have a virtually unlimited “right” to sue. Certainly no one wants to be accused of trying to take away anyone’s rights. But what exactly is the right to sue? We hear about rights constantly but perhaps we don’t think about what they are. And who decides? We know that people assert claims and they get decided by juries. But we don’t think much about who should have authority to decide. As is so often the case, accepting the frame of reference has determined the outcome o
