[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 6]
[Senate]
[Page 8118]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            VOTE EXPLANATION

  Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask that it be submitted to the Record 
that I inadvertently missed the vote on cloture on the motion to 
proceed to S. 22, the Medical Care Access Protection Act of 2006, due 
to unavoidable airline flight delays. Had I been present, I would have 
voted ``yea.''
  Americans are going to spend $2.3 trillion this year on health care. 
One out of every three dollars does not go to help anybody get well. We 
are never going to be able to compete globally if we cannot control the 
health care costs in this country. The threat of medical liability 
raises the cost of health care for everybody in this country.
  Only 16 percent of the lawsuits that are filed across the entire 
country have any merit whatsoever--84 percent of them are filled with 
the idea that we can intimidate people into settling a case so a lawyer 
can make money. It has nothing to do with the patient. It has 
everything to do with enriching the trial bar. I have experienced that 
personally as a physician who has delivered over 4,000 children into 
this world.
  We have a problem with out of control medical liability--the cost of 
defensive medicine alone is up to $126 billion per year. We can fix 
those problems. But we can't fix them by protecting special interest 
groups that have been protected for years--special interest groups that 
claim they want to do something great for people but who most of the 
time are motivated to do something great for themselves.
  The Medical Care Access Protection Act of 2006 is based on the 
successful Texas model of medical liability reform. It's a solution to 
the problem that is already getting results.

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