Bush and the docs

I suppose I should weigh in on the State of the Union address last night, but I confess that I didn't watch it. I didn't need to hear Bush speak to know that he would beat the old malpractice horse and call for fewer "junk lawsuits" against doctors. I have to wonder sometimes whether doctors still fall for this. It's the domestic policy version of blaming Osama bin Laden for the war in Iraq.

In the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, Bush and his policy operation helped organize doctors and whip them in to a frenzy about malpractice lawsuits, promising them that support for Republicans would bring them relief from high insurance premiums and "lawsuit abuse." Some states went ahead and passed legislation making it harder for injured patients to sue their doctors. But no one ever really thought Congress would do anything about this, much less the White House, whose lobbying efforts on the med mal bills were half-hearted at best. After all, medical malpractice law is overwhelmingly a state issue, not a federal one. Even some Republicans can see that.

Doctors, though, with all their white-coat protests and threats to abandon their elderly patients to move to Guam or whatever state had a "better liability climate," provided Bush and his corporate backers with a useful tool for passing another anti-consumer bill they really did want, the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA). Of course, CAFA had nothing to do with medical malpractice, but the doctors' protests enabled Bush to equate legal reform with helping Marcus Welby, M.D.

Remember how Bush showed up in Madison County, Illinois for a photo op with some nice doctors in 2005, just a few weeks before CAFA went to the Senate floor? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce had already made the county the poster child for class action reform, but Bush made it sound like passing it would fix the health care system. Talk about bait and switch! Doctors, though, I've come to realize, have a bit of a tin ear when it comes to politics. I do hope someday they realize that they've been had...