Bush & Cheney Mislead on Tort Reform

Noah pointed me to the following article in the Daily Mislead. (For the uninformed, Noah is Laura's husband. I worked with the latter at LECG, and she and Noah are a good friends of ours. For the record, Noah is a die-hard liberal wacko, just like you dad.) Here is an excerpt from the article:

According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), costs from malpractice lawsuits represent less than 2% of the nation's total health care spending, and the tort reform legislation pushed by President Bush would reduce health insurance premiums by less than one-half of one percent. While President Bush has claimed that lawsuits cause "docs to practice medicine in an expensive way in order to protect themselves in the courthouse," a study by the Harvard University School of Public Health "did not find a strong relationship between the threat of litigation and medical costs." Additionally, a study in the Journal of Health Economics compared medical costs in states with limits on lawsuits to states without limits and found only tiny savings - less than three-tenths of one percent.

The point of the article is that Bush's proposal to reform tort law is misguided b/c the effect of such reform has only a small, but what appears to be a statistically significant, effect on healthcare costs. I don't follow this logic. If such reform is found to have a beneficial net effect, is not that a good thing? The fact that it is a "tiny" net benefit does not seem to support the conclusion that its bad policy.