President Obama Endorses Health Courts
On Tuesday, President Obama issued a letter to congressional leaders in which he proposed appropriating $50 million to states to pilot medical liability alternatives, including special health courts. Developed by Philip K. Howard’s nonprofit legal reform coalition Common Good and the Harvard School of Public Health, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the health court proposal has been long championed by Howard and Common Good as the best way to bring reliability, efficiency, and fairness to medical justice. Health courts would also reduce the practice of defensive medicine – which adds billions of dollars of waste to the cost of health care – and would provide for the openness needed to improve patient safety.
In a Common Good press release, Howard states: “This is a huge breakthrough. … Special health courts should provide quicker justice to patients injured by mistakes and give physicians confidence that they will not be dragged through years of litigation when they did nothing wrong.”
Howard was also featured in HealthLeaders Media. “I think it’s very important as we build American healthcare,” Howard said an the interview, “to create a reliable system of justice that all parties can trust.”
[Yahoo! News]
[Common Good]
[HealthLeaders Media]
March 04, 2010 | Comments (0) | Permalink