Sarah Palin tagged you in the note "I am the half-wit who used to govern Alaska"

There’s much to ridicule in Sarah Palin’s new Facebook note, not the least of which would be her willingness to claim that her experience as Alaska’s governor — a job she bizarrely vacated less than a month ago — provided her with unique insight into the economic and legal nuances of health care reform. In a characteristically staggering moment of narcissism, Palin argues for some sort of equivalence between (1) her status as a “target” for ethics complaints and (2) doctors who face “false, frivolous, and baseless” lawsuits from “similar opportunists.” A sane, considerate adult would be embarrassed to say these things out loud, but to the degree that Palin is to politics what Dr. Nick Riviera is to medicine, the cheerful lack of self-awareness is hardly surprising.

In any event, the preliminary silliness is nothing more than a set-up for a semi-literate, boilerplate discourse on a decades-old Republican talking point (i.e., the alleged need for tort reform to cap malpractice awards). Palin, who implausibly claimed that the time and cost of fighting ethics complaints made it prohibitively expensive for her to do her job, apparently also believes that malpractice suits — which account for roughly 1 percent of health care spending in the US — are breaking the entire system. Like most conservatives who argue for “tort reform,” Palin elides the difference between “frivolous” suits (which the courts, by all accounts, do an efficient job of rejecting) and decisions rendered by juries in actual cases of malpractice. Her solution, predictably, is to use the thunderous power of the state to cap awards; for someone who believes phantom “death panels” are looming over the horizon, Palin’s faith that government can establish a fair ceiling on the economic value of human life is remarkable. Ultimately, capping malpractice damages might have the effect of reducing malpractice suits, but it will reduce legitimate ones as well, and it won’t do anything to reduce the cost of liability insurance, which represents far and away a greater weight on the cost of health care than any malpractice suit that winds its way through the courts. More significantly, the link between “tort reform” and better, safer health care is opaque at best. I’m sure Sarah Palin has an explanation for why damage caps will spur medical practitioners to new heights of Hippocratic vigilance, but she’s probably trying to decide how that issue relates to something she did while she was mayor of Wasilla.