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Over dinner one night in 2004, a discussion about the upcoming presidential election between Thomas Suarez,1 MD, and a colleague led to a lingering question. "We were talking about how policies regarding state-to-state medical malpractice seemed to have gone so awry, and we said, 'Wouldn't it be wonderful if people in the Congress and the Senate really understood the problem?' " Suarez says. "And from there, it turned into trying to find out how many of these elected officials were actually doctors."