Last month, we held a featured discussion between Ron Chusid, founder of Doctors for Kerry, and our own Ted Frank, a Bush supporter, which contributed to the debate on medical malpractice from each presidential candidate's perspective. This month, we're looking into medical malpractice once more. In lieu of a back-and-forth format, this month we're inviting comments from some leading thinkers on medical malpractice reform to discuss a new paper by Daniel Kessler of Stanford Business School, the Hoover Institute, and NBER, prepared for the Manhattan Institute (this site's host).

Professor Kessler, along with Mark McClellan (who now heads up Medicare), wrote the seminal study in 1996, "Do Doctors Practice Defensive Medicine." His new paper discusses how the U.S. malpractice system works, examines the empirical evidence both on the malpractice system as it exists and on various tort reform measures, and analyzes various policy approaches that have been suggested to deal with the problem.

We're expecting comments from other leaders including Philip K. Howard, the founder and chairman of Common Good and the author of The Death of Common Sense and Collapse of the Common Good; Dr. Richard Anderson, Chairman and CEO of the Doctors Company, the largest mutual (doctor-owned) medical malpractice insurer and author of an earlier Manhattan Institute study on medical malpractice; and "Syndey Smith," a/k/a MedPundit, a practicing physician who runs one of the most successful weblogs on health care issues.

I expect a wide-ranging and provocative discussion.