Do we need tort reform?
I had a great talk with a guy in the pool at the Comfort Suite in Oak Creek Wisconsin yesterday. We started our conversation about how it would suck to have a room where your balconey faced the pool-- very loud. Then he brought up that he was from Green Bay, obviously not going to the "Peh-krs" game. He liked my tattoo. I didn't really like his eagle tattoo, but I didn't say anything. He worked for Blue Cross/Blue Sheild. I brought up tort reform, thinking this was safe politically, but he closed up a bit.
"Does that bother you?" I asked.
"It's B.S., that's all."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
He then went into a fairly indepth discussion (totally unexpected) about how award size doesn't matter much. The reason rates have gone up -- he was a rates adjuster -- is because the economy is not doing so well, and HMO's can't get the return's they used to get when they invested payers money. Since Blue Cross "cannot get their target 11% rate from stocks, bonds, and t-bills" anymore, they have to raise their rates so they don't empty out their invested holdings. "We get about 5 or 6 percent now," he said. He even called tort reform a "smokescreen for bigger problems" at one point.
Wow. I hadn't thought about this. Anyone else? This hit me especially hard, since this was actually one of the three reason's I could think of to support Bush.
Thoughts...