Insurance companies and assorted medical associations and groups often argue that a national tort reform law must be enacted to curb escalating costs, including outsized jury awards in medical malpractice and wrongful death cases.

The argument often focuses on, and favors, capped awards -- ceilings -- that limit recoveries. An oft-made claim is that more bright people will take up medicine if they don't have to fear an expanding arena of lawsuits, and that diagnostic testing costs will go down if recoveries are limited, because doctors won't be so concerned with practicing defensive medicine. Overall, proponents of aggressive tort reform say that it will make health care costs cheaper for consumers generally.

Those claims are stood on their head by a national report just issued by Public Citizen, a nonprofit research group. The organization's report responds specifically to tort reform carried out in Texas, which it says has been a colossal failure since its enactment in 2003.

Limited damage awards there, say researchers, have not resulted in cheaper health care or encouraged more doctors to practice. Instead, precisely the opposite has happened: Since 2003, health care premiums in Texas have risen faster than the national average; the number of doctors practicing has actually declined; health coverage is flatly unaffordable to more Texans; and diagnostic tests closely associated with the practice of defensive medicine have increased dramatically and at a faster pace than the national average.

The Texas law has been touted by its supporters as a model for national adoption. Public Citizen calls it "a failed experiment" and says that the people who benefit most from it are doctors and insurers.

Related Resource: American-Statesman, "Report: Texas' tort law has failed to reduce health costs, attract doctors" Oct. 12, 2011