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Posted 10/15/11 by Common Good

Philip K. Howard Argues for Health Courts

Common Good Chair Philip K. Howard recently spoke at the Union League Club in Chicago on the topic of healthcare, defensive medicine, and health courts. Modern Physician reported that according to Howard:

[P]eople [are] feeling powerless to oppose nonsensical legal or bureaucratic rules imposed on them by well-meaning politicians—many of them now dead—who sought through the rules to keep anything bad from ever happening. And now legislators lack the will to amend rules to fit current circumstances, he said. Howard urged the students to question and make fun of the rules and "write about this with clear eyes."

Howard made the common sense point that legal fear should not define how doctors practice medicine. Instead of traditional tort reform, which has proven to have limited effecitveness, Howard advocated health courts, a Common Good solution that "would not have juries but would be led by full-time health judges with a budget to hire neutral experts to testify on the merits of a malpractice case."

Read the full report from Modern Physician here.