I'm assuming you're talking about this article.  It is the admission of Obama's own doctor (an admitted fan and supporter) and Obama himself in his speech to the AMA that he is more concerned with keeping the pocket books of the trial lawyers healthy than with reducing the costs and increasing the affordability of health care.

Scheiner takes a few other shots too. Looking at Obama's team of health advisors, Scheiner doesn't see anyone who's actually in the trenches. "I have a suspicion they pick people from the top echelon of medicine, people who write about it but haven't been struggling in it," he says.

Scheiner is critical of Obama's pick for Health and Human Services secretary--Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who used to work as the chief lobbyist for her state's trial lawyers association.

Scheiner says he never thought it was appropriate to talk about health policy with Obama, especially once he became a U.S. Senator. The one exception was medical malpractice reform. "I once briefly talked to him about malpractice, and he took the lawyers' position," he says.

Funny, trial lawyers get scapegoated by some people whenever the subject of health care reform comes up. It is not trial lawyers who commit malpractice. And it is not trial lawyers, or bleeding heart liberal biased juries, who have caused our health care premiums to rise, or who mandate rescission policies on people who get sick or injured to move them off the insurer rolls.

All this malpractice malarkey  is a canard. The number of malpractice payments declined 15.4% from 1991 to 2005. Adjusted for inflation average annual award payments for jury decisions declined 8% over that same time frame. One third of the malpractice cases, where there was a payment awarded, happened due to the death of a patient (4,504). A 1999 Institute of Medicine report estimated anywhere from 44,000 to 98,000 deaths occurred each year in our hospitals due to preventable medical errors.

All this information is a vailable from a report by Public Citizen, a national non-pprofit public interest organization, which was published in 2007. Here is the link to the report www.citizen.org

I might add, the doctor who is quoted in the cited article advocates the single payer option very strongly.

Interesting report, particularly the fact that the malpractice insurance agencies made $803 million in profit in that year, compared to $4.1 billion paid out in settlements. Too bad it doesn't break that profit down more specifically, such as adminstrative overhead, bonuses, shareholder payouts, etc. It would be interesting to really see what percentage of the premiums go to settlements and expected overhead and how much is purely lining the pockets of the insurance agencies.

The report also makes the point that malpractice cases are prone to "repeat offenders" who rarely face discipline from their state medical board. That's a definate area for improvement. Even then, state board discipline does not always help. KGET recently had several reports about a plastic surgeon who came here after being disciplined in another state and now faces malpractice charges here. So there also needs to be more cooperation between states to prevent a bad doctor from "state hopping".