Legal News

Twitter Wars! Groups Duke it Out Over Health-Care Summit

By Ashby Jones

For now, unless and until it becomes law, at which point the litigation firestorm will almost assuredly break loose, there just aren’t that many legal angles to the health-care debate. It’s all preexisting conditions, insurance premium costs, and the expansion of Medicaid. Over and over and over again. On MSNBC and Fox, behind closed doors and in the open. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

But there is one topic within the broader health-care debate that lies near and dear to our hearts: what to do about medical-malpractice lawsuits? We’re generalizing here, but many Republicans think they’re partly to blame for ballooning insurance premiums and the practice of defensive medicine; many Democrats think the argument’s a red herring.

Those issues got a little airtime on Thursday at this much ballyhooed health-care summit, mostly as raised by Republicans looking to push reform. According to the BLT blog, at the start of the meeting, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), said there are too many "junk lawsuits against doctors." He continued:

"In our state, [in] half the counties, pregnant women have to drive to the big city to have prenatal health care or to have their baby, because the medical malpractice suits have driven up the insurance policies so high that doctors leave the rural counties," Alexander said.

And according to the Washington Post, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) emphasized the importance of restricting malpractice lawsuits.

But on these issues, the real battle took place on Thursday in, where else, the Twitter-sphere! The American Association for Justice, a group that lobbies for the plaintiffs’ bar, just wrapped up its Twitterly coverage of the hearings. The Institute for Legal Reform, meanwhile, hasn’t yet signaled that it’s done for the day. On into the night for both of you, we say! On into the night!

So who won the Med-Mal Twitter War? Well, for sheer volume it was the AAJ, who managed to put up over 50 tweets (by our count) over the course of the day. The ILR put up about 20.

For readability, we can’t discern a clear readers. Both included nuggets that made perfect sense, we’re guessing, only for those with a huge interest in the debate and who had the time to pay attention to C-SPAN III for six hours today. From the ILR:

Seelye on state pilots in NYTimes: comparatively small budget commensurate w/ Admin’s level of interest in subject http://is.gd/9awfW #hcr

Compelling? Absolutely! But check out this morsel from the AAJ:

Once again, CBO says most anti-patient tort law changes save 1/2 of 1% of all HC costs, but may increase mortality rate http://bit.ly/2Npa9i

Nothing, we say, like cramming a debate on one of the most complex issues to ever come before Congress into a series of 140-character blasts. Well done!

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 25, 2010 (boomark / email).