OK, Maybe It's Time For Medical Malpractice Reform

Like a lot of people, I played the New York Times' "Fix The Deficit" game yesterday. And one of the ways I chose to fix the deficit was to agree to a law limiting medical malpractice suits. Why? Not because it would save a ton of money from the deficit -- it wouldn't -- but because I was trying to build my own particular deficit-reduction program to be somewhat politically feasible. I figured that meant throwing a few bones to the right.

Today, however, I'm starting to think there are more important reasons to enact reform. Take this New York Times story:

"Large banks, hedge funds and private investors hungry for new and lucrative opportunities are bankrolling other people’s lawsuits, pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into medical malpractice claims, divorce battles and class actions against corporations — all in the hope of sharing in the potential winnings."

Yikes! The Times' deficit game yesterday warned that enacting malpractice reform would take away an incentive for doctors to avoid critical mistakes. And I can see the benefits of getting investors in on the side of small-time plaintiffs who might otherwise be overwhelmed by the vaster legal resources of the medical establishment.

But this story makes it seem that malpractice suits are really distorting the incentives; if the money people would rather invest in a lawsuit instead of (say) a new business that makes things or serve people, then things are out of wack. Time for a reconsideration.

Karzai: Yankees Go Home

Washington Post: "KABUL- President Hamid Karzai said on Saturday that the United States must reduce the visibility and intensity of its military operations in Afghanistan and end the increased U.S. Special Operations forces night raids that aggravate Afghans and could exacerbate the Taliban insurgency."

Essentially, Karzai wants Americans to pursue a counterterrorism strategy -- focused more on the Pakistani borderlands -- than the current nation-building counterinsurgency. And if that's what he wants, that's probably what he should get: Afghanistan is a sovereign country, after all. Unless we're willing to suggest that he's implicitly sheltering terrorists by ordering a reduced American troop presence in his country -- thus making him the enemy -- we should probably start ratcheting down the war after a long and mostly failed decade.

Of course, Karzai might just be making sounds in public that his countrymen want to hear while begging Americans, behind the scenes to stay. I'm dubious his government could survive long without its American patron. But I'm not sure how long America can survive its patronage. Karzai wants us to draw down and go home. Maybe it's time to do just that.

The Government Doesn't Want You To Know What You Already Know About Nazis in America

Lots of interesting stuff in thisNew York Times report about a Justice Department report detailing the history of Nazi war criminals in the United States. The Times obtained an unedited copy after a heavily redacted copy was released to the public. So of course this is what happened in the redacting:

"Even documents that have long been available to the public are omitted, including court decisions, Congressional testimony and front-page newspaper articles from the 1970s."

I'm going to become a libertarian weirdo yet.

Defending Philly Police and Stop-and-Frisk

Temple's Jerry Ratcliffe offers a defense of stop-and-frisk today, but, well, not really:

"Much has been made of last year's increase in pedestrian stops and their disproportionate impact on minorities. However, 250 police officers were added to the force last year - the largest contingent to leave the police academy in years. Many of these new officers were posted to foot patrols in high-crime neighborhoods, many of which are predominantly African American. It is therefore hardly surprising that a majority of the citizens stopped by police were black.

Our research found that after three months, the areas with foot-patrol officers did see an increase in pedestrian stops, but they also saw a 22 percent reduction in violent crime. These results are not microscopic: They represent dozens fewer victims of homicide, robbery, and aggravated assault."

It seems to me there are two separate issues at play here: Police staffing and police tactics. And what Ratcliffe is offering here isn't really a defense of stop-and-frisk, but a defense of putting lots of officers on foot patrol in high crime areas. The second option I can get behind! It's not dissimilar from Gen. Petraeus' counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq: Putting officers on the ground (as opposed to sealed off in a squad care, talking to nobody except victims and perps at crime scenes) helps them build relationships with the community and makes them more likely to notice when something's askance. Sure it leads to more arrests -- it would, simply by virtue of having more cops around -- but it does so in the context of community.

Stop-and-frisk, on the other hand, can alienate a community by dragooning lots of innocent people: Remember, only 8 percent of stop-and-frisk encounters end in an arrest. And remember: Ratcliffe doesn't link the drop in crime to these tactics, but to improved police staffing in high-crime neighborhoods. We're supposed to bless stop-and-frisk by association, apparently.

In any case, Ratcliffe gives the game away when he makes this statement: "Of course, if the perceived level of risk is to be raised, citizens in high-crime neighborhoods are likely to be increasingly inconvenienced and to experience a ramped-up police presence. This does not necessarily mean their civil rights are being violated; nobody is above being stopped by the police."

Actually, I'll disagree with that. Lots and lots of people are above being stopped by the police -- not because they're uppity, but because they're citizens. Police don't have the right to stop and detain people without probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed; the fact that 92 percent of people walk away from these encounters without any kind of criminal charge suggests, to me at least, that the police are exceeding their rights by a considerable margin.

Philly Police Corruption Watch

Our local newspapers are now saying that "more than a dozen" officers have been arrested over the last year rather than risk losing track of the count again. Here's the latest development: "Former city Police Officer Malaika Mebane, who was caught receiving oral sex from a female prisoner in a jail cell, was sentenced yesterday to two to four years in state prison followed by seven years of probation. Mebane, 39, was arrested Oct. 16, 2009, just hours after a female police officer discovered him in a jail cell with the prisoner inside the 35th Police District, at Broad Street and Champlost Avenue."

KSM and Obama's Banana Republic

When the rule of law is completely subverted to political considerations you've pretty much lost the game: "The administration has concluded that it cannot put Mohammed on trial in federal court because of the opposition of lawmakers in Congress and in New York. There is also little internal support for resurrecting a military prosecution at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The latter option would alienate liberal supporters."

The Backlash Against Airline Security

This is a healthy development, particularly if it gets the TSA to back down: "But the new pat-downs have prompted a growing backlash among pilots and flight attendants, civil liberties groups and security-weary passengers who say the touching goes too far.'It's more than just patting you down. It's very intrusive and very insane. I wouldn't let anyone touch my daughter like that,' said Marc Moniz of Poway, Calif., who is planning to accompany his daughter's eighth-grade class from San Diego to Washington in April. 'We're not common criminals.'"

At some point, the growing intrusiveness of pre-flight security checks was bound to become more than airline passengers would tolerate, and perhaps we're getting to that point. And if we are, then the TSA should back off. Why? Because it's the passengers who are incurring the risk if they decide to live with lower levels of security screenings on flights: They're the ones who might be taken hostage, or see their plane used as a missile, or blown up in the sky. Americans are smart people: They think about these things. And if they're weighing the certain loss of dignity in a TSA patdown versus the almost-infinite odds they'll be on the plane AlQaeda attacks, perhaps the government should respect that calculation.

Related, a reader of Jim Fallows writes: "What bothers me is that I am on the verge of re-deploying from Afghanistan after a 10-month combat tour that involved having to deal with, among other things, conducting searches of local nationals when involved with security tasks within my Infantry company. At no time were we permitted or even encouraged to search children or women. In fact, this would have been considered an extreme violation of acceptable cultural practice and given the way word travels here, been a propaganda victory for the Taliban."

Unfortunately, we seem to believe that we can prevent another attack of terrorism if only we try hard enough, if only we tighten security a little more, if only we raise our defenses a little higher. That's ridiculous. It only takes one person to get through the system to be successful. It doesn't mean the system doesn't work: It means the system isn't perfect, because no system is. At some point, we're going to have to accept that's a part of life, and not worth a never-ending series of tradeoffs in which civil liberties and personal dignity always, always, always get the short end of the stick.