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As we’ve noted before, it’s tough to know just how much medical malpractice contributes to health-care spending. Not only do you have direct costs like malpractice premiums, you also have the harder-to-quantify indirect costs of defensive medicine, like extra tests doctors order out of fear of lawsuits.
But its the job of the number crunchers at CBO to put a number on that sort of thing, and they’ve just come out with their latest figures on the subject. Specifically, they estimated what would happen if there were a national cap on punitive and noneconomic damages as well as other new rules that could limit doctors’ liability exposure.
They found that such changes would lower the nation’s total health bill by about 0.5%, or $11 billion a year at current spending levels. That includes 0.2% in savings from lower direct spending on malpractice, and 0.3% in savings from “slightly less utilization” of health care as a result of less defensive medicine.
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