A joint program of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center and Common Good

Many of the problems of healthcare, including “defensive medicine,” lack of candor, excessive paperwork, and fracturing of professional relations, can be traced to distrust of our system of justice. A new Harris poll, to be released shortly before this forum, suggests that legal fear has transformed medicine in ways that are dramatically counterproductive to all constituencies. A healthy system of justice makes people feel comfortable doing what's reasonable, and nervous doing what's not. Today in America, justice makes healthcare providers nervous doing almost anything. This forum will address whether we need an entirely new system of medical justice to “cure” healthcare.