This is what the Manhattan Institute has to say, that most medical malpractice suits did not involve actual injury according to a study of 30,000 cases in New York:

Trial Lawyers, Inc.'s defenders typically will assert that tort litigation has a deterrent effect on risky or negligent activity, which it undoubtedly does, but in our current civil justice system it also deters any activity that might lead to high-cost lawsuits, which is not at all the same thing as actual risk. For instance, a seminal Harvard Medical Practice Group study gathered data on more than 30,000 New York hospital patients from a weighted sample of more than 2.5 million and found that the vast majority of medical-malpractice suits did not involve actual medical injury--and that most cases in which there was actual injury involved no doctor error--which makes the claim that medical-malpractice litigation serves mainly to deter doctor misconduct a peculiar argument indeed.

What say ye, specifically and statistically, Drum Majors?

I'm very glad you raised that point. We're still looking into the Harvard Medical Practice study that the Manhattan Institute cites, but some facts jump right out.

First of all, that the Harvard Medical Practice study doesn't look at 30,000 malpractice cases, it looks at 30,000 patients. Only 47 malpractice claims are scrutinized. This isn't a major shortcoming of the Harvard Medical Practice Study because the study's main aim isn't to see whether malpractice cases are well-founded or not, but it is a significant weakness in the Manhattan Institute's attempt to use the study to make this argument.

In essence, the Manhattan Institute's point here rests on a study claiming that out of 47 medical malpractice cases arising from care provided back in 1984, 8 met the study protocol's definition of medical negligence. That's hardly a statistically significant sample of the thousands of malpractice cases filed. To further weaken the Manhattan Institute's point, not all of the 47 cases filed won in court--the number of cases where the court ruled that malpractice occurred and imposed damages is even smaller. This is thus a completely inadequate sample for demonstrating whether or not malpractice lawsuits deter medical negligence.

It's also worth pointing out that the Harvard Medical Practice Studies reaches the opposite conclusion from the Manhattan Institute. Harvard's researchers argue that "not too many, but rather too few suits were brought for the negligent injuries inflicted on patients."

That's what we say so far. Stay tuned as we look into the study further.

The intellectual dishonesty that you exposed in the Manhattan Institute study (kudos) is all too typical of the Right.

Bob Herbert hit the nail on the head in his Times column on Monday, when he wrote: "The art of Bush-speak is to achieve the effect of a lie without actually getting caught in a lie." The White House's successful campaign to convince a majority of American's that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 is the classic example.

While the Manhattan Institute didn't exactly lie about the Harvard study, it certainly seems that they cited selectively from the study, and in so doing gave a false impression about the studies sample and it's conclusion. Clearly, they started out with their own predetermined conclusion, and set out to find evidence to support it. And, when they could find no legitimate evidence they decided to distort what they could find--but without techinically lying.

Sure does sound familiar.

If the Manhattan Institute is taking Harvard's study and playing spin games with it, it would be nice to see a compare and contrast of the opposite conclusions the two organizations reached, with direct quotes from the Harvard study...