Medical malpractice lawsuits are common and controversial in the United States. Since early 2002, doctors' insurance premiums for malpractice coverage have soared. As Congress and state governments debate laws intended to stabilize the cost of insurance, doctors continue to blame lawyers and lawyers continue to blame doctors and insurance companies. This book, which is the capstone of three years' comprehensive research funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, goes well beyond the conventional debate over tort reform and connects medical liability to broader trends and goals in American health...

Medical malpractice lawsuits are common and controversial in the United States. Since early 2002, doctors' insurance premiums for malpractice coverage have soared. As Congress and state governments debate laws intended to stabilize the cost of insurance, doctors continue to blame lawyers and lawyers continue to blame doctors and insurance companies. This book, which is the capstone of three years' comprehensive research funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, goes well beyond the conventional debate over tort reform and connects medical liability to broader trends and goals in American health...

This volume revisits the Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow's classic 1963 essay -Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care- in light of the many changes in American health care since its publication. Arrow's groundbreaking piece, reprinted in full here, argued that while medicine was subject to the same models of competition and profit maximization as other industries, concepts of trust and morals also played key roles in understanding medicine as an economic institution and in balancing the asymmetrical relationship between medical providers and their patients. His...