Too many doctors are being forced to practice defensive medicine, which is driving up health care costs. As governor, I will work to pass tort reform legislation to reduce the number of junk lawsuits which benefit trial lawyers and hurt virtually everyone else. Tort reform will help reduce the cost of health care and improve the quality of care received by patients.
I believe that individuals need to be empowered to take responsibility for their own health care. We need to provide better general wellness information, comparative information on health plans so people can choose the policy that best meets their needs and focus on prevention.
One of the biggest challenges the next administration will face is over Medicaid. This is one of the fastest growing parts of our budget, and with shrinking state revenues and more Washington, D.C. mandates, we will have to confront some hard realities head on. Most importantly, I believe we need to strengthen and support our New MexiKids programs so children have the care they need and deserve. Our Medicaid dollars have been spread thin and we need to re-focus on core priorities, such as protecting our children, while rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in the system.
I also support an incentives-based approach to health care reform as opposed to government requirements. I support providing businesses in New Mexico with tax credits to help extend coverage to their employees, and individual tax credits for those who choose to purchase their own coverage. Small businesses should also be able to band together to enjoy the same purchasing power of the larger companies, and allow consumers to purchase health insurance across state lines injecting increased competition into the system resulting in better options and lower costs."
News New Mexico Analysis: Family physicians know more about health care than we do. When we talk to them they speak of the hours of time wasted every day due to mal-practice litigation threats that force them to practice defensive medicine. Avoiding lawsuits that enrich tort lawyers swallows enormous amounts of time. The topic of tort reform should be central to solving the nation's health care dilemmas. The doctor's office we visit for our annual checkup routinely has a jam-packed waiting room. We spoke to a medical student recently who often serves 30 hour shifts in her residency training. The short-term sacrifices made by med students are enormous. And once they enter practice, they are sure to be swamped. On the other hand, in a good year any clever tort attorney might have a handful of major cases to pursue. However, when one of these lawyers can successfully point an accusing finger and convince a lottery-minded jury that an error has been made by a physician doing his or her best, lawyers rake in huge fees. In the meantime, by and large, physicians continue to take on tremendous workloads. After a dozen years or more of schooling doctors do the hardest professional work in society as they go about the business of trying to heal people.
The difference in the Denish and Martinez position papers on health care is like night and day, as are the primary sources of their campaign funds. More than 450 lawyers and lobbyists provide the very foundation of the Denish fund-raising machine. We encourage readers to evaluate the healthcare issue carefully and comprehensively and determine for themselves which candidate's approach contains more common sense regarding best practices, elimination of wasteful nonsense, and the addition of government programs.
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