Healthcare Management

9534Leading up to the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in March 2010, federal liability reforms were contemplated as a means of garnering support for the legislation among congressional Republicans and medical professional organizations. Although no liability-reform provisions survived in the final bill, Congress made clear the need for more experimentation. The final legislation authorized $50 million for states and health care systems to test new approaches to the resolution of medical-injury disputes. This authorization supplemented the $23 million that the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) awarded in 2010 for projects to advance new approaches to medical-injury compensation and patient safety” (Kachalia and Mello, 2011, p. 1564).

Which of the medical liability reform approaches described in Tables 2 and 3 of Kachalia and Mello (2011) do you favor? Why?