>>>>>Do you truly think that when a doctors' practice is forced to pay outrageously high insurance premium, because of no-limit for malpractice lawsuits, it reduces the number of malpractice cases? By the way, the tv channels are full of ads by law firms basically "suggesting" to people how they can get money in malpractice cases. So I wonder how many of the quoted "100,000" cases are "fabricated". Maybe lawyers are all at fault? <g>
>>>>
>>>>Lawyers will destroy civilization :).
>>>>
>>>>The 100000 cases are official statistics of people who died of medical error. The previous number I remember was 90000, but that was a decade ago. The lawsuits are probably related more to those who survived :).
>>>>
>>>>Waving the problem of malpractice suits in front of any discussion about the state of health industry is a nice red herring, though - as if the same problem doesn't exist in many other areas (i.e. wherever lawyers detected money to be siphoned through their pockets).
>>>>
>>>
>>>Let me share with you another "little" piece of the puzzle that adds to the cost of health-care. I know many people who work as programmers, developers, DBA, (techies) for insurance companies. Each probably makes at minimum $100,000. Each, for sure, spends 50% of the time (or more) at work browsing the web, checking personal email, participating in political discussions on UT <g>, checking their investment portfolios, etc.
>>>Could be a huge savings if we cut some of them <g>.
>>
>>I don't think so. Those salaries, and their associated burden, are a drop in the bucket. Here's a look at compensation for some health insurance company CEOs: http://www.healthreformwatch.com/2011/03/16/health-insurance-ceo-total-compensation-in-2009/. The 2009 numbers average around $13 million.
>>
>>Tamar
>
>I picked one company out of the list of the CEOs, Aetna. The company serves approx. 35 million people and has a revenue of 34 billion dollars in 2010. The CEO gets about 18-20 million. This is less than 1% of the total revenue. You or I, on the other hand, earn 100% of out company's revenues (just kidding). My point is that if you pay the CEO of Aetna 0 dollars, I very much doubt that the cost of the insurance will be reduce by 2 cents. On the other hand, the malpractice premiums that hospitals and doctors pay to the insurance (because lawyers have not control on how much they will look in settlements) greatly increase the cost of doing business in medical field.

But I was responding to your claim that canning a few IT folks, who were milking the system, would lower the cost of insurance.

Tamar