What is the basis for stating that state-sponsored liability protection is probably less inclined to simply deny claims? Would doctors be treated differently than patients? Medicare has a claim denial rate that is approximately double the average of private medical insurers.

Lacking this assumption, the rest of the argument fails.

Costs comparisons for medical care in the UK and the USA are measured in terms of GDP devoted to total care whether from patient or government.

With a pure government system, medical need alone determines payment and so med-mal is not needed for the function of adverse outcome insurance. In a market system, private health insurance should not have to pay for care caused by error, and you get high cost determinations of fault. That system has more error in itself than it resolves.

Don’t plaintiff’s lawyers like to claim that the American liability system – which includes the doctors’ assets being at risk – improves quality of care? If that’s true, the single payer/”doesn’t hit doctors in their pockets” system results in lower quality of care.

As for “the whole thing cost[ing] less,” we all know how that is achieved -and it would be intersting to compare the relative standards of care applied to medical negligence cases in the various systems.

[B]ecause Sweden, Canada and the U.K. have forms of universal health care coverage, the government covers most liability claims or subsidizes physicians’ coverage. As a result, settlements are more common in the U.K., and liability “doesn’t hit doctors in their pockets, so you don’t see as much defensive medicine” as in the U.S., Mason said.

How novel. Doctors in single-payer systems have state-sponsored liability protection (which is probably less inclined to simply deny claims) and therefore practice less “defensive medicine,” so the whole thing costs less to run. Who woulda thunk it?

I guess it’s too much to ask that the authors take a head count to see how many of the “tort reform” proponents in the US are also opposed to single-payer.