No. “Tort reform” does not improve access to care and physician shortages result from factors having nothing to do with liability. When Texas enacted severe “tort reform” measures in 2003, access to medical care grew by “close to zero.” When the General Accountability Office looked into this issue, it found that to the extent there are a few “access to care” problems in the country, there were other explanations “unrelated to malpractice,” that problems “did not widely affect access to health care,” and/or “involved relatively few physicians.”
