I just found this entry, “More on liability reform and the medically underinsured” (actually, I found it a couple of days ago and just had time to read it!). Apparently, scholars are doing empirical studies on any relationship tort reform might have to the number of uninsured.

Just to be clear, if I’m reading this right, the issue here is not about medical malpractice insurance for physicians, but about general health insurance. The issue, as summarized here is:

Ronen Avraham & Max Schanzenbach, “An Empirical Study of the Impact of Tort Reforms on Health Insurance Coverage,” which was a very clever time-series analysis that showed a relation between tort reform legislation and higher rates of insurance coverage (i.e. fewer uninsured). Although the effect is not large, it does corroborate the idea that fewer successful lawsuits = less defensive medicine = lower insurance costs = more people with insurance.

That quotation is from a paper the Point of Law blog discovered over a year ago. More recently he stumbled up this one: “How Do the State Medical Malpractice Laws Affect the Access to Health Care?” It found, “caps on non-economic damages are associated with decreasing rates of uninsured.”

So it is not just about medmal rates, it is about making health coverage more widely available.