This week, the North Carolina Medical Society joined the AMA and 99 other medical and physician organizations in supporting HR 5, the Help Efficient, Accessible, Low-Cost, Timely Healthcare (HEALTH) Act of 2011. In a letter sent to the sponsors of HR 5, the organizations expressed strong support for the bi-partisan legislation, which seeks to reform the nation’s broken medical liability system. Click here to read the letter.

“The proven reforms contained in the HEALTH Act would help reduce costs, while ensuring that patients who have been injured due to negligence receive just compensation,” the letter states. “This bill provides the right balance of reforms by promoting speedier resolutions to disputes, maintaining access to courts, maximizing patient recovery of damage awards with unlimited compensation for economic damages, while limiting non-economic damages to a quarter million dollars.”

“The HEALTH Act would put in place proven reforms, similar to those already working in states like California and Texas” said AMA Chair Ardis Dee Hoven, MD. “Every dollar that is spent on medical liability costs is a dollar that could go to patient care.” Additional information is available at: http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/news/news/ama-organizations-support-health-act.shtml.

The letter was sent the same day that President Obama delivered his State of the Union speech to  Congress. In his remarks, the President expressed a willingness to find ways to lower health care costs through medical liability reform and improvements in the new health care reform law.