President Obama's healthcare plan is expected to cost $900 billion to implement.
Obama has stated that his plan will pay for itself through efficiency boosting measures like online medical records, and a focus on wellness and preventative care.
Obama believes that this approach will ultimately keep more Americans healthy, thereby avoiding their need for expensive healthcare.
Republicans are adamant that tort reform should be one piece of the cost-reduction puzzle.
More specifically, they would like to see a $250,000 cap on all medical malpractice lawsuits.
Democrats, who are heavily backed by trial lawyers, oppose these measures, but may be forced into a compromise.
In 2006, researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) studied 1,452 malpractice lawsuits to determine how many of these claims were frivolous.
Their findings cast doubt into the severity of the medical malpractice lawsuit boon: - Ninety percent of the litigants had sustained injury.
Twenty-five percent died and 80% were partially or severely disabled.
- Of those injured, researched found that 67% of injuries were a result of malpractice.
The other 37% lacked concrete evidence of error.
- Of the 37% that did not involve error, only 28% received compensation (around 10% overall).
- Of the minority of lawsuits in which patients received compensation when there was no discernible error by their physician, the damages awarded were 40% less than cases in which errors had occurred.
In short, the study found that malpractice lawsuits were generally not as frivolous as the public's perception.
However, the average monetary award of the cases studied by HSPC was still over $450,000.
A cap of $250,000 would serve to curb health insurance spending to a degree, but it is far from a silver bullet.