Lawmakers’ long, heavy-going struggle to enact Pennsylvania’s budget didn’t give state residents much to delight in, but it did help settle a timely debate: How much does the public pay for medical liability costs? Tort-reform opponents insist that litigation against medical professionals bears minimally on the cost of medicine. We’re apparently to believe that patients end up covering no significant portion of the high malpractice insurance premiums that doctors have to pay. We’re expected to think that lawsuits aren’t driving physicians out of Pennsylvania, reducing the supply of practitioners and inflating health-care cots. And still, the same Harrisburg that didn’t consider excessive litigation a big enough problem to approve tort reform instead created the Medical Care Availability and Reduction of Error Fund (Mcare) in 2002. When a jury orders a medical practitioner to pay damages to a plaintiff, Mcare helps pay those damages. (If the state thinks most plaintiffs deserve these awards, you have to wonder why it takes on a financial burden to help the defendants pay them.) This year, though, lawmakers decided they needed to use $808 million from the Mcare fund to close a massive budget hole. That figure represents roughly 1/34 of the $27.799-billion spending plan that Gov. Ed Rendell signed. For a state that cannot legally run a deficit, that fraction is enormous. In other words, Mcare’s very existence threatened to throw Pennsylvanians’ state budget severely off-balance. (It still does, if some doctors successfully sue the commonwealth to restore Mcare’s funding.) Remember, many politicians actually favor this costly program over letting doctors shoulder malpractice insurance costs on their own. That is, they expect Pennsylvanians would suffer even more without Mcare than with it. The upshot: Pennsylvanians pay dearly for the state’s medical-liability crisis, whether as patients or as taxpayers. Only real tort reform can eliminate these crushing expenses.  (Source:  www.doctorsadvocate.com) Obtain Medical Specialty Own-Occupation Disability Insurance On-line