Addressing this was W Bush's solution to the healthcare cost problem. But payouts due to malpractice suits are around 1% of medical expenditures and not all of those payouts are bogus.
Directly, yes. But there's a significant effect in overtreatment that is substantially higher. Hard to tell how much higher, because of course, all this overtreatment is justified somewhere. What we know is that we're paying about $10k/family/yr more than we should. The article treats this pretty well -- noting that malpractice isn't the only solution, but admonishing democrats for being too swayed by trial lawyers who want to keep feasting at the malpractice trough.
It is easy. The US pays twice as much as comparable industrialized countries for the same outcomes. Doctors in the US make twice as much, overhead is twice as much, and we pay twice as much for prescription drugs.
The US also does most of the innovation, develops most of the drugs, equipment, devices, and treatment regimens, and/or improves on or develops feasible products and treatments based on foreign research and development elsewhere.
Most of drug R&D is done as basic research in universities. Drug companies do do research, but their marketing budgets are higher than their R&D budgets. A large portion of the research is looking for baldness-cure/dick/sex pills, along with a substantial sum spent on patent work-around research which isn't setting out to create anything new, just do the same thing in a new way to work around someone else's patent.
The cost of the drug R&D you are talking about (aside from publicly funded NSF/NIH research) is minuscule in comparison to the healthcare spending expenditures we are talking about. Device/procedure research is even less of a blip.
