Medical malpractice reform must be a part of any meaningful health care reform. It is a place where patients and physicians/hospitals have a common interest.

No patient or physician wants a bad outcome to a medical procedure. But we know they happen sometimes due to "negligence" and sometimes bad things just happen. If the goal of health care is to deliver high quality care, why treat people who are equally hurt, one by "negligence" and the other not, differently? Both need additional medical treatment. And if possible, we all want to avoid similar bad outcomes in the future.

Using assignment of "blame" as a means to pay for future medical expenses seems wrong-headed. If everyone is covered, medical malpractice or not, then we can focus on high-quality medical care and avoiding the same "mistakes" in the future. Aren’t those more important goals?

If we abolish medical malpractice as we know it, physicians (not the government) would have to develop better ways to discover why "mistakes" happen and ways to prevent them from happening again. That is to change from a blame assignment/avoidance system to one that tries to improve the quality of care delivered to everyone. Wouldn’t that be a more useful part of a health care system?

The current adversarial system between physicians and their patients benefits only three groups: medical malpractice insurers, medical malpractice defense and plaintiff lawyers. Abolishing medical malpractice is an important step in repairing the physician patient relationship. Getting physicians and patients on the same side will result in better medical care and, coincidentally, the demise of medical malpractice insurers and their familiars. That doesn’t bother me. How about you?