November 2, 2009 12:42PM # Health Care Bill Improves Lawyers’ Financial Health By [Ilya Shapiro](https://www.cato.org/people/ilya-shapiro) --- SHARE The great thing for legislators about a [nearly 2000 page bill](http://docs.house.gov/rules/health/111_ahcaa.pdf) — such as, oh, the House’s latest health care salvo — is that very few people bother to read the whole thing. So it’s easy to bury little gifts to favored supporters. Or big ones. For example, check out section 2531 — that’s pages 1431–33 for those following along at home — which has gone largely unnoticed in the major news cycle. These three pages of the bill reward states that refrain from setting (or repeal) any caps on medical malpractice rewards — and the accompanying lawyers’ fees! — by requiring the Secretary of Health and Human Services to provide them a bribe an “incentive payment.” As [Hans von Spakovsky notes](http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YWVlOGUxYWEyNGFhYWM5Y2IwNWNhZmE0NmFiZGJlYTI) at *NRO’s Corner*, this “alternative medical liability law” aims to eviscerate cost-saving measures that protect doctors from frivolous lawsuits that *increase the cost* of health care to the consumer. So this has nothing to do with providing better or cheaper care, covering the uninsured, or even eliminating waste and fraud. Instead, it’s a pure sop to one of the Congressional Democrats’ key constituencies: trial lawyers. For more information on free market health care reform alternatives, please visit Cato’s Health Care website [here](http://healthcare.cato.org/). ##### Related Tags [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics), [Health Care](https://www.cato.org/health-care), [Constitutional Law](https://www.cato.org/constitutional-law), [Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies](https://www.cato.org/robert-levy-center-constitutional-studies) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).