Medical Malpractice and the U.S. Health Care System

William Sage received his medical and law degrees with honors from Stanford University in 1988 and has been a member of the faculty of Columbia Law School since 1995. In 1993, he headed four working groups of the President's Task Force on Health Care Reform in the Clinton White House. He recently served as principal investigator for the Project on Medical Liability in Pennsylvania. He is also the recipient of an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and has published more than 60 articles in legal, health policy, and clinical journals. He is an elected fellow of the Hastings Center on bioethics, and is a member of the editorial board of Health Affairs. He is married with two children, and lives near New York City. Rogan Kersh received his B.A. from Wake Forest University, and his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Yale University. He has taught political science and public administration at Syracuse since 1996; his extensive political experience includes internships in the U.S. Senate and British Parliament, as well as work in the Washington tax-policy office of Coopers & Lybrand, and think tanks in Washington and Tokyo. His book Dreams of a More Perfect Union was published in 2001, and he is currently completing two books on health policy. He is a board member of the Critical Review Foundation and associate editor of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law.

Part I. Framing Medical Malpractice as a Health Policy Issue: 1. The medical malpractice system: structure and performance Michelle M. Mello and David M. Studdert; 2. Malpractice reform as a health policy problem William M. Sage; 3. Medical malpractice and the new politics of health care Rogan Kersh; Part II. The Health Policy Impact of Medical Malpractice: 4. Who pays when malpractice premiums rise? Mark V. Pauly; 5. The effects of the US malpractice system on the cost and quality of care David J. Becker and Daniel P. Kessler; 6. Liability, patient safety, and defensive medicine: what does the future hold? Troyen A. Brennan, Michelle M. Mello and David M. Studdert; 7. Medical liability and the culture of technology Peter D. Jacobson; Part III. Malpractice Reforms that Solve the Right Problems: 8. Promoting fairness in the medical malpractice system Maxwell J. Mehlman; 9. Caps and the construction of damages in medical malpractice cases Catherine M. Sharkey; 10. Expertise and the legal process Catherine T. Struve; 11. Disclosure and fair resolution of adverse events Carol B. Liebman and Chris Stern Hyman; Part IV. In Search of a 'New Paradigm': 12. Enterprise liability in the 21st century Randall R. Bovbjerg and Robert Berenson; 13. Private contractual alternatives to malpractice liability Jennifer Arlen; 14. Medical malpractice insurance reform: 'enterprise insurance' and some alternatives Tom Baker; 15. Governments as insurers in professional and hospital liability insurance markets Frank A. Sloan and Charles E. Eesley; 16. Medicare-led malpractice reform Eleanor Kinney and William Sage.