Sarah Palin takes a well-aimed shot at one of the key drivers of soaring health costs in the USA (and the UK) – tort litigation:

…we cannot have health care reform without tort reform. The two are intertwined.

For example, one supposed justification for socialized medicine is the high cost of health care. As Dr. Scott Gottlieb recently noted, “If Mr. Obama is serious about lowering costs, he’ll need to reform the economic structures in medicine—especially programs like Medicare.” 

Two examples of these “economic structures” are high malpractice insurance premiums foisted on physicians (and ultimately passed on to consumers as “high health care costs”) and the billions wasted on defensive medicine.

She quotes some figures:

The average obstetrician-gynecologist (OB-GYN) delivers 100 babies per year. If that OB-GYN must pay a medical liability premium of $200,000 each year (which is the rate in Florida), $2,000 of the delivery cost for each baby goes to pay the cost of the medical liability premium.”

Seems to me she’s on to something.

The more so since the more medicine is ‘socialised’, the fatter the target for lawyers to aim at. If the government does not have the money to pay for any judgement it loses, why, just borrow some from future taxpayers.

Where is the moral hazard in that?