President Obama is widely expected to toss Republicans a bone at Thursday's health care summit, by publicly embracing what's known as "tort reform."
By tort reform, Republicans and medical professionals mean caps on non-economic punitive damages in lawsuits where patients or their survivors have proven in court that they were the victims of gross medical malpractice.
Proponents have long dominated the framing of the issue with their arguments that tort reform will lead to lower health care costs and will free doctors from practicing defensive medicine. But that narrative is flawed. And it completely neglects how punitive damages essentially the only way that patients have of holding medical professionals and organizations accountable when they kill, maim or injure people through their negligence, ignorance or even malice.
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