>>any denial of any kind of service resulting in any kind of negative outcome for a patient are litigated.

Its going to be tort reform via proxy since rationing is inevitable when there's no $. FWIW in my youth I went to Africa to save the world and saw how practice carries on when there's no $. It's possible, but sad- sad to see what used to be lovely facilities falling into disrepair, staffed by good people exercising all their wits to provide good services despite the conditions, and then one day you wake up and realize that you've become desensitized to avoidable suffering and death because it's the norm. It won't be that bad in the US, but what are people expecting if Medicare really runs out of $ while everybody pretends not to notice. Over there I met a US doctor who subsequently came back to a successful East Coast practice before going back to Mozambique last year to help get their med school going again... anyway, when I left he asked me to send him a present: a box of angiocaths. He always thought of others first. Seems to me that the idea that life is about service has fallen out of fashion and if we could get some of that back rather than fretting about web sites, insurance and other worldly concerns, society would function a lot better and people would be a lot happier. Such is life.