Yesterday Morning

I woke up at about 2:30 AM on Labor day and couldn't get back to sleep. After watching the show about the guy who lived with bears until he and his girlfriend got eaten by them, then looking at his wikipedia page, then looking at the wiki list of unusual deaths that got me laughing a little too inappropriately at times, I decided on a plan to bore myself back to sleep by turning the television to C-Span. There was something good on. It was a focus group of 25 "undecided" voters who were asked tons of questions and asked to rate their emotional reactions to plenty of campaign ads, the aarp ads that have been playing, and asked to prioritize what they felt was most important in this elections, and characteristics that were most important to them in both the parties and the candidates. It was so up to date as to ask the group how they felt of the news on the GoP not holding their convention due to the hurricane. It was infinitely interesting to watch people express both unique points of view while a few people just reiterated the same things people say on television. What all people seemed to share was a frustration with government in general and a feeling of futility that either candidate would be able to implement the "change" they were unable to quite define but wanted. They also were upset at the lack of "accountability" in government and frustrated that nothing gets done to help the majority of Americans. One lady sticks out in my head because she was pretty much irrationally anti-lawyer to the point that she stated all doctors should be immune from lawsuits under all circumstances. One other guy was a bit less anti-lawyer than her and expressed the opinion that health care costs are higher in part due to doctors over ordering medical tests for patients to cover themselves from suit. I think to a small degree this guy is right. Most of the real big malpractice wins are from dead babies. Dead babies going to a jury is just so inherently emotional for the average jury that it puts the insurance company defending the doctor at a huge disadvantage in terms of a huge 1-2 million dollar jury award against their insured. So they hike the rates on malpractice insurance to put pressure on doctors and the legal system to cap malpractice damages allowed. Nevada is one of those jurisdictions that have capped malpractice damages. So the 7-9 people that got infected with HIV or Hepatitis C are limited to 350,000 for their pain and suffering. There is no cap on economic damages (expected future health care costs as a result of the malpractice). I guess I should back that stuff up too. Those stats are pretty old but it shows the problem. Insurance companies jack up rates to try to induce jurisdictions to cap, scare the jurisdictions that they will lose skilled doctors to other jurisdictions if they don't cap pain and suffering. Once successful, they then keep the rates for doctors high anyway. Nevada is a great example of that. Caps got put in and doctors that are trained here leave to other states despite no state income tax and not enough doctors. They won't stop until every doctor is as immune from prosecution as those scab warriors running around Iraq.


So I never went back to sleep, but that was o.k.