Look! Medical malpractice insurance rates stabilized!

Good thing we enacted all that “tort reform” and stopped all those dirty, dirty trial lawyers from bringing their frivolous lawsuits and… waitaminute. No we didn’t. (1)

Huh. Funny how that worked out.

(1) well, maybe not nationwide. Here in Ohio, we of course have Senate Bill 80, signed in December 2004 and effective April 2005, which made some kind of inroads against supposed frivolous suits and skyrocketing damage awards, but I’m kind of having a hard time seeing how that bill, or any other like it that might have come up in the 2004 election cycle contributed to the already-steeply declining trend in insurance rates shown on the report.

Also, this post is of course a HUGE snark on my part, and the subject deserves a lot more actual thought than I’ve put into it here — so I promise that I’ll address it in more detail in the near future.