This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Friday, April 21st, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Republicans in Congress are hoping to change the way medical malpractice insurance works.

Some leading proposals would make it harder for plaintiffs to win malpractice suits.

But what if many of the problems associated with medical malpractice could be ameliorated

through contract.

Walter Olson, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, comments.

Way back since the 1980s, there has been the continual reports of medical malpractice premiums much higher than they

used to be much higher than doctors pay elsewhere outside the United States focused especially

on high-risk specialties like obstetrics, orthopedic surgery. And for libertarians, this has been a subject of interest for justice long.

Libertarian's have been writing about this.

Starting with a libertarians have been writing about this.

Starting with, I shouldn't say starting,

but early on, Richard Epstein, known and loved by libertarians who follow the law schools, wrote a seminal piece for Cato, I believe, called

Medical Malpractice the case for contract.

And I think I'd like to start there because it is still highly relevant and especially if we are not resigned to a system where the government just winds up running things as a

quasi-governmental system as a pessimistic view of the Obamacare episode would

lead us to. We ought to step back and think about how would it run in a freer

society and what can we learn from that, what elements of a freer society could be preserved

or even expanded in an area like this.

Epstein said we need to look at it through the lens of contract and this hearkens back to the traditional libertarian celebration of the Liseafaire legal order

that emerged sometime around the 19th century in which status was replaced by contract.

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