TY  - JOUR
AU  - Kessler,Daniel P.
AU  - McClellan,Mark
TI  - Do Doctors Practice Defensive Medicine?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 5466
PY  - 1996
Y2  - February 1996
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5466
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5466.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Daniel Kessler
Hoover Institution
Stanford University
434 Galvez Mall
Stanford, CA  94305
Tel: 650/723-0596
E-Mail: fkessler@stanford.edu

Mark B. McClellan
Director, Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform
Senior Fellow, Economic Studies
Leonard .D. Schaeffer Director's Chair in
Health Policy ,The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036
Tel: (202) 741-6567
Fax: NA
E-Mail: mmcclellan@brookings.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 1996-05-01
AB  - `Defensive medicine' is a potentially serious social problem: if fear of liability drives health care providers to administer treatments that do not have worthwhile medical benefits, then the current liability system may generate inefficiencies many times greater than the costs of compensating malpractice claimants.  To obtain direct empirical evidence on this question, we analyze the effects of malpractice liability reforms using data on all elderly Medicare beneficiaries treated for serious heart disease in 1984, 1987, and 1990.  We find that malpractice reforms that directly reduce provider liability pressure lead to reductions of 5 to 9 percent in medical expenditures without substantial effects on mortality or medical complications.  We conclude that liability reforms can reduce defensive medical practices.
ER  -