The following is a converstion between President Obama and various Republicans at yesterday’s health care summit. It has been shortened for sake of brevity, but none the less is copied verbatim from the transcript of the summit–everything below is exactly as it was transcribed:

SENATOR McCONNELL: Thank you very much, Mr. President. John Boehner and I have selected Lamar Alexander of Tennessee to make our opening framing statement, and let me turn to him.

SENATOR ALEXANDER: Number three, put an end to junk lawsuits against doctors.

THE PRESIDENT: Tom.

SENATOR COBURN:
We have a system throughout the country where we’re encouraging lawsuits that aren’t productive for the country and what they actually do is cause the cost of health care to go through the roof.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, Tom, I appreciate what you said.
Now, the private marketplace, you mentioned the issue of medical malpractice and frivolous lawsuits, and as you indicated, these are areas where Secretary Sebelius has already begun to try to give states some incentives to do that.

THE PRESIDENT: Okay. Max is going to go, and then I’ll go to you, Rob.

SENATOR BAUCUS:
In addition, you mentioned lawsuits. Secretary Sebelius is working to try and find ways to encourage states to settle, resolve issues before they become big, bad lawsuits.

THE PRESIDENT: Dave.

CONGRESSMAN CAMP: Thank you, Leader Boehner, and thank you, Mr. President, for the invitation today.
A key way of reducing costs that’s missing from the House and Senate bills is responsible lawsuit reform that guarantees injured parties, much like our two largest states have adopted — Texas and California — access to all economic damages, such as future medical care.

THE PRESIDENT: Okay, I’m going to let — Rob, feel free to respond to anything that Dave indicated or to any of the other issues that have been discussed.

CONGRESSMAN ANDREWS: Thank you, Mr. President. I want to thank my friend Tom Coburn, and John Kline, for the spirit of conversation which they offered and try to carry that forward a little bit.
Junk lawsuits, I think that there’s — what Secretary Sebelius is doing is very important in curtailing that.

OBAMA: I want to see if there are any Republicans who want to speak. I still have Dick Durbin.

MCCONNELL: Mr. President, I think John McCain.

MCCAIN: Thank you, Mr. President.

…But I want to talk about one specific issue on deficit reduction, and that is medical malpractice reform. And the — and the point is that we don’t have to go very far. There’s two examples right now of medical malpractice reform that is working. One’s called California, the other called — called Texas.

When Dick Durbin finally got a chance to speak, he did himself proud by trashing the argument, yet again. But rather than covering Durbin’s response, I’ll simply refer readers to Blue Texan of this morning, or Elliott, here, or to the WaPo transcript. I will note, however, that after Durbin’s very effective trashing of the GOP tort reform argument, Obama was non-committal to the point of being abruptly dismissive. On the whole, Obama had more and better things to say about tort reform than he did the public option. And that is a very troubling disgrace.

But I want to focus here just briefly on a recent study by Public Citizen–a non-profit consumer rights organization–of what tort reform has accomplished in Texas–a reform that Republicans admire so very much that it was brought up at the Summit more than once, and has been touted by them again and again. The study, published just three months ago, is titled:

Liability Limits in Texas Fail to Curb Medical Costs.

The Public Citizen study tracks various outcomes of Texas’ tort reform act, which passed with substantial Democratic help in 2003. The tort reform measures have now been in place for about six years–surely enough time to get a good measure of the law’s impact on Texas insurance consumers.

Here is Public Citizen’s summary:

…most of the claims touting positive effects of the Texas law – which took effect in September 2003 and included a $250,000 per defendant liability cap – are flatly contradicted by the data.
By the measures commonly used to evaluate health care – such as cost, the uninsured rate, and access to care – Texas has regressed since its liability law took effect. Collectively, these measures show that Texas has one of the worst health care systems in the United States.
Moreover, since 2003 Texas has either failed to improve or grown even worse compared to other states on almost every measure.

Since the liability laws took effect:

• The cost of health care in Texas (measured by per patient Medicare reimbursements) has increased at nearly double the national average;

• spending increases for diagnostic testing (measured by per patient Medicare reimbursements) have far exceeded the national average;

• the state’s uninsured rate has increased, remaining the highest in the country;

• the cost of health insurance in the state has more than doubled;

• growth in the number of doctors per capita has slowed; and

• the number of doctors per capita in underserved rural areas has declined.

The only improvement in Texas since 2003 has been a decline in doctors’ liability insurance premiums. But payments by liability insurers on behalf of doctors have dropped far more than doctors’ premiums. This suggests that insurers are pocketing more of the savings than they are passing to doctors.
There is no evidence that any of the savings has been passed on to patients or taxpayers more generally. The data suggest that Texas liability “reform” is just a giveaway to liability insurers and, to a lesser extent, doctors.

And so will it be at the national level, should the Texas tort reform so beloved by Republicans ever be helped along–in whatever way–by President Obama or his HHS Secretary.

Tort reform has been so thoroughly discredited, so many times, that it is amazing Obama has the stomach to even utter the words "tort reform", let alone say pleasant things about it.

Aside from the fact that tort reform doesn’t work–that it is a cheap and sleazy sell out of American consumers– it is also undesirable on the grounds of good government. Just as we now have an activist SCOTUS that reaches needlessly in order to undermine the legitimacy of a separate branch of government (Citizens United), tort ‘reform’ represents a mirror image to that activism. Tort reform places legislative restrictions on issues that are the domain of judges and courts, not legislators. At least one legislator (and perhaps only one) clearly addressed this at yesterday’s meeting. So thanks Dick Durbin, for speaking out (and, by the way, Dick Durbin for Majority Leader, please).

Keep an eye on what this administration does with tort reform. If they actually end up using a health care reform bill to promote this sleazy trick (covering it, no doubt, with some bipartisan ribbons and bunting)–they will have hit a new low.