Center in the News
The lack of adjustment to reflect inflation or the growth of household incomes is inequitable, because it lowers the real value of the reward — which in current dollars, could be as much as $1.5 million – six times the 1975 value, says Prof. Jack Needleman, chair of the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health's Department of Health Policy and Management. "The second issue is that the cap, by lowering the risk of suit for malpractice, has also weakened the deterrent effect of risk of being sued on physician’s efforts to avoid malpractice."
A number of hospitals are now seeking to raise their treatment prices by as much as 15 percent. They say they've been hit by salary increases for nurses. It comes as local health care workers are on strike at Cedars Sinai. So, are we going to see inflation in health care costs? How much will premiums go up?
An analysis released today by UCLA researchers suggests that California’s longtime cap on pain-and-suffering awards in malpractice cases could actually have contributed to an increase in malpractice cases over the past 50 years — potentially by weakening the deterrent effect of being sued.
UCLA researchers reviewed state Medi-Cal data on potential malpractice cases from huge screw-ups like mismatched blood-type infusions or objects left inside patients. The researchers found more of these preventable mistakes — about 16 percent more — in states where such caps exist.
Since California spent
If the California Assembly bill promising government-run health insurance coverage for all becomes law, it would radically change the pecking order for health care workers, the companies that employ them and the patients they serve, according to health policy expert Jack Needleman. Primary care physicians would command better pay, for instance, while specialists would likely see the so-called single-payer system created by the proposed law push back on their rates, said Needleman, chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at University of California, Los Angeles.
There are people who practice specialized medicine who are often discouraged by the fees that Medi-Cal pays from locating in places where Medi-Cal patients live or taking Medi-Cal patients on if they can avoid them,” Needleman said. “By raising the payments for lower income people, for those who historically have been...on Medi-Cal or those who've been uninsured, you create a more attractive environment for some people to go practice where they otherwise wouldn't have."
"California is a big, diverse place. If you can make it work here, you can make it work anywhere," Jack Needleman, chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at UCLA's Fielding School of Public Health, told ABC News.