If you have been following the political career of Mark Kirk at all, you likely have a bad neck. In the days before the 2008 election, he was telling IL-10 voters that he'd support the Obama agenda. Since the election and especially since his senate campaign announcement, he's been diametrically opposed to everything Obama tries to do. Just yesterday, Kirk gave the republican response to the President's weekly address and spoke against health care reform touting his bill that centers around... well, nothing. It's a law to prevent the government from getting between a person and his or her doctor. It also includes tort reform. He uses the already debunked comparison between California and New Jersey to prove a false point. Kirk claims that tort reform keeps premiums down in California and the lack thereof increases premiums in New Jersey.
The key to Kirk’s claim that medical malpractice laws control annual insurance premiums, is that the malpractice laws are much stricter in California than in New Jersey. It's just not true. First, the tort limits of the two states for the time periods Kirk uses in his comparison are not all that different per a comparison done by the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Second, while it seems intuitive that high malpractice payouts would increase health care costs and insurance premiums, two studies of malpractice cases came up with a different reason, faltering investment markets. In 2005, Dartmouth School of Economics found that malpractice premium payment growth tracked the general economy more than it tracked malpractice awards. They concluded that it was the decrease in the interest rate on investments that caused malpractice premiums to rise.
The University of Texas study tracked malpractice awards and malpractice premium rates and found no sudden rise in claims payments to explain the spike in malpractice premiums and no unusual correlation between claims payments and malpractice premiums. That study basically agreed with Dartmouth's conclusions on the decline of investment income and found problems with insurers investment portfolios being under-diversified.
If Mark Kirk is truly looking for the reasons for increased malpractice insurance premiums, he should take another look at the general economy, the deficit for which he voted along with the Iraq War and the outcome of all the banking and investment deregulation he favored over the years.
In addition to his radio address, Kirk made a couple of additional points on the economy this week. First, he suggested that the U.S. further coordinate its monetary policy with China by installing an economic hotline between the two countries. Kirk's sales pitch for this idea is as he told the Chinese news organization China View:
The United States' monetary policy "should be carefully coordinated with America's largest creditor (China).
Finally, Kirk doesn't want to allow a small town in Northwest Illinois to get the jobs that would come from bringing in Gitmo detainees. Thomas, Illinois has a mostly unused prison. The prison was supposed to bring jobs, but has been practically unused since 2001. Residents of Thomas want the detainees so that the promised prison jobs would finally be created. Probably because it's the republican position that the prison at Guantanamo Bay remain open, Kirk has written to President Obama seeking to halt the deal. Kirk said:
If your Administration brings Al Qaeda terrorists to Illinois, our state and the Chicago Metropolitan Area will become ground zero for Jihadist terrorist plots, recruitment and radicalization.Furthermore, since Thomson is located in the Northern District of Illinois, any civilian prosecution of Al Qaeda terrorists would occur in Rockford or downtown Chicago.
Thomson Village President Jerry "Duke" Hebeler showed a little more courage and common sense than Kirk:
A murderer is a murderer no matter where he's from.
Kirk doesn't seem to understand that the Gitmo detainees would be in prison and not at the local Days Inn.