Introduction

With the United States embroiled in its third major medical malpractice crisis in the past thirty years, this volume brings together an array of experts from law, medicine, social science, and business to explore the public policy of medical liability. As malpractice premiums continue to rise, doctors and lawyers engage in bitter debates across the country, and legislators struggle to comprehend and consider a myriad of proposed medical liability reforms, this volume provides an explanation of malpractice policy past and present-and a set of promising paths forward. The major failing of the current debate over malpractice reform is that it ignores the relationship between medical malpractice policy and core characteristics of American health care. For reasons both deliberate and circumstantial that this book describes, conventional approaches to medical liability barely pay lip service to the persistent inequities of access to health care and health insurance in the United States, to the recent revelation of serious safety and quality problems in medical “systems,” or to the decades-long battle being waged against rising public and private health care expenditures. Yet these forces are largely responsible for the severity of the current malpractice crisis and point the way to solutions far more promising than the measures-little changed since the 1970s-on which malpractice reformers and their opponents both fixate. The authors’ collective purpose is to close the gap between malpractice policy and health policy.