Malpractice comment

Surely being a doctor is a difficult and demanding task. But I think you are hard pressed to argue that it’s more difficult than engineering an automobile to last for ten years with minimal maintenance without failing catastrophically when pushed to its limits.

If I understand your argument, doctors have no great incentive to improve their care because they can see all the patients they can treat anyone. If this is so, at least the fear of lawsuit gives than incentive. A negative incentive is as good as a positive from the standpoint of the patient.

I work as a computer programmer and there’s no great incentive to do good work, other than personal pride. I’d still have a job if I didn’t and for the most part no one sees my code but myself. Employers often can’t distinguish between good and nediocre performance. I think this is a situation that occurs in a lot of professions.

You argue that doctors are being sued for undesirable outcomes. I thought there had to be some element of negligence or substandard treatment to win a lawsuit. No doubt lawyers have won by convincing a jury even when there was no substandard care, but no doubt they’ve lost cases even where there was.

It’s true doctors are getting squeezed because of the rising cost of malpractice insurance. But this is a result of the increased number of doctors graduating in the past decade or so. For some reason that’s unclear to me there was an expansion in the number of seats in medical schools. Supply goes up and reimbursements are squeezed. It’s happening in my profession too. Just because doctors have found out that the laws of economics apply to them too does not seem a reason to me to pass special interest legislation to protect their livelihood.

I’d say the vast majority of doctors DO good work. the problem is that all doctors are getting punished for the sins of a few. To use the car manufacturing analogy, its like General Motors is punished for Chrysler putting out shoddy work. Another problem is that individual physicians can only work within the system (or non-system, as the case may be) that they are forced into. If that system is more cost-conscious than quality-conscious, as are many managed-care settings, than that’s a problem. A physician may want to prescribe a better antibiotic for his patient, but if he can’t afford it and if the insurance doesn’t approve of it, then the physician is saddled with no choice but to provide suboptimal care. Its that, or no care. but the physician still bears the responsiblity and the liability.

Would someone be good enough to post the “Hippocratical oath” that all physicians supposedly swear to,so that I may have an unbiased opinion about this, money versus your health argument please?