New study confirms that passage of tort reform does not attract more doctors

Like in many states (including my home state of Mississippi), tort reformers claim that physicians were abandoning the state in droves because of the lack of tort reform. They used this argument to scare the public and politicians into passing tort reform that hurts, not helps, 99% of their constituents. In fact, at the time that Mississippi's doctors were allegedly fleeing our "jackpot justice" state, there were newspaper articles in other states claiming that the doctors in those states were also fleeing .... To Mississippi. Apparently, Mississippi missed out on a major source of revenue by not adding a state border crossing tax on any vehicle containing a physician.

After tort reform is unfortunately passed in these states, the tort reformers then come back later to claim that doctors are returning en masse to the point that there are doctors on every street corner.

A recent study performed by David A. Hyman with the University of Illinois College of Law, Charles Silver with the University of Texas at Austin Law School and Bernard S. Black with the Northwestern University School of Law debunks the claims of tort reformers by studying the medical community in Texas both before and after their ill fated passage of tort reform in 2003.

Their study found no evidence to support either of the claims of tort reformers. As they stated, "physician supply was not stunted prior to reform". It also did not "measurably improve after reform" was enacted. The authors even studied the differences between low risk types of medicine (i.e. family physicians, etc.) and high risk specialties (ob gyn, neurosurgery, emergency room). The study found that tort reform did not increase the number of doctors even in these high risk practices.

The full study can be found here - ssrn.com/abstract=2047433

So, once again, tort reformers are shown to use factually baseless scare tactics to pass laws that protect no one but profit only the few.