Lead author Michelle Mello, JD, PhD, a professor of law and public
health at the Harvard School of Public
Health in Boston, Massachusetts, and coauthors write that $55.6 billion is not a trivial amount, but "less than some imaginative estimates put forward in the health reform debate, and it represents a small fraction of total health care spending."
Of the $55.6 billion, $45.6 billion is due to defensive medicine, mostly in the form of hospital as opposed to physician services.