You can look at the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care and see the costs of medical care, and medical malpractice reform just doesn't seem to have any effect on medical care costs.
https://www.dartmouthatlas.org/interactive-apps/medicare-rei... Price-adjusted total Medicare costs per enrollee, that belt of bright red along the Texas coast? Texas capped non-economic medical malpractice damages at 250,000, and still they have some of the highest Medicare spending in the country. Since this data is price adjusted this isn't so much a measure of how expensive a treatment is in the hospital, but of how many events a patient undergoes in a year. So Texas doctors continue to have very high utilization rates, even after malpractice reform. So it wasn't just "defensive medicine" that was driving that, but something else.
https://www.dartmouthatlas.org/interactive-apps/medicare-rei... Price-adjusted total Medicare costs per enrollee, that belt of bright red along the Texas coast? Texas capped non-economic medical malpractice damages at 250,000, and still they have some of the highest Medicare spending in the country. Since this data is price adjusted this isn't so much a measure of how expensive a treatment is in the hospital, but of how many events a patient undergoes in a year. So Texas doctors continue to have very high utilization rates, even after malpractice reform. So it wasn't just "defensive medicine" that was driving that, but something else.