Healthcare Revisited –Legal Factors in Healthcare Costs
We have nine times as many lawyers per capita as France and forty times as many as Japan. Does this make sense to you? Medical issues have become a staple for the Legal Industry. I am convinced that when there is an oversupply of lawyers, they have no choice to create additional business opportunities. The result is an increase in costs to drug companies and physicians and hospitals in the form of malpractice insurance.
One example that amazes me is the blood thinner drug Xarelto. As of this writing, they had settled a class-action lawsuit. I found the following describing the results of the suit.
“Makers of the powerful blood thinner Xarelto have agreed to pay $775 million to settle about 25,000 lawsuits that claim the drug caused serious injuries such as internal bleeding, stroke, and death. “It may have taken more than four years and six separate trials but litigation like this is an important way for consumers to have a voice in matters of drug safety,” attorney Brian Barr, co-lead counsel for plaintiffs in the litigation, said in a news release. Bayer and Johnson & Johnson jointly sell Xarelto and will each pay half of the settlement. Neither company admitted liability.”
While this is not surprising, the fact that they are still aggressively advertising the drug on TV is!
I can’t excuse the abuses of Drug companies outlined in Chapter 4. But there is clear evidence that the legal profession is one industry that is milking the healthcare system and thus the taxpayer.
Source for the following: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical_settlements\
“The National Practitioner Data Bank, a computer database of the United States Department of Health and Human Services that collects information about physicians, has released its annual report concerning medical malpractice payouts. According to the published report, approximately $4,031,987,700 was paid to plaintiffs in medical malpractice lawsuits in 2018.