You’re kidding, right? You think patients sue less in a nationalized healthcare system because the doctors make less money?

Patients sue less, and receive less money in judgements, in a nationalized health care system because the government owns the system and limits it’s own liability.

The argument over limiting noneconomic damages to $250K or $300K or $500K……..

In my state, the (state-run) medical school and hospital gets it’s TOTAL liability limited to $200K TOTAL.

BY STATUTE.

You get a bad baby case or a brain damage case, trauma case, etc. The MOST you will get at our medical school is $200K total. Mine is not the only state that does that.

it’s personal because we often make mistakes when we the system forces so much overhead cost on us that we need to work like dogs to take home a paycheck. ( the lawyers love the system..the more dysfunctional it becomes, the harder we have to work to make ends meet, the more likely a mistake occurs or a patient gets angry becuase we had to rush.)

it’s personal because we care.

it’s personal because the expectations of excellence don’t fit with the demand that we work like short order cooks.

it’s personal becuase of the years and years we put on hold to be able to get where we are at.

the only practical solution seems for physicians to conceed that we cannot do good work on every occassion on everyday/night on every deciion on every patient.

then we need to stop kidding ourselves that we can be excellent practitioners in this system so highly prized by multimillion dollar CEO’s and litigation lawyers.

we need to stop begging legislatures for relief and just withdraw from this insane dyfunctional system.

insanity is to continue doing the same thing over and over again hoping that a different outcome will be gained.

Try a National Healthcare System. I guarantee less lawsuits against individual doctors.

“Malpractice lawyers, led by the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, counter that rising premiums have more to do with the insurance industry than jury awards. They say tighter regulation of the industry is needed.”

Listen very carefully.

THAT. IS. A. LIE.

Let me make sure you understand this.

THEY. ARE. LYING.

I will not say they are wrong or misinformed. The studies have been commissioned by Jeb Bush in Florida, got a commission of mostly lawyers, including Donna Shalala, as you may recall formerly head of HHS under Clinton. Now she’s president of a college in Florida (University of Miami? not sure). The conclusion of that study was that the primary driver of premium is the size and frequency of awards, not the insurance investment climate or any particular practice of insurance companies.

Senator Richard Durbin, who represents the American Trial Bar in the Senate, and in his spare time represents the people of Illinois, commissioned a GAO study of the same issue. The General Accounting Office came to the same conclusion.

At the time the study came out, a tort reform bill was in the Senate. The bill had passed the House, the President indicated he would sign it. The bill died in the Senate on a pure party-line vote.

Senator Durbin commissioned the study, along with some House members of a similar philosophical bent. Faced with a study he commissioned, with results that his paymasters in the American Trial Lawyers Association would not like, the fine Senator from Illinois suppressed his own study until the bill died in the Senate, and THEN he allowed the report to be released.

Now imagine another scenario, where the GAO report concluded that the cause of rising premium was more malpractice than historically. How fast do you think Durbin would have released that study?

Imagine still another scenario where, say, a REPUBLICAN Senator commissioned such a study with conclusion that the cause of rising premium was more malpractice, and the REPUBLICAN Senator suppressed that study? We’d be hearing about that “scandal” daily in the press. How many of you know Durbin even did that?

So yes, maybe before these studies came out, you could say the trial bar was just misinformed. These studies have come out, and the trial bar is still making claims proven to be untrue.

They are lying.

Just consider these numbers, given by Dr. Palmisano last Februrary. On any given day, 125,000 suits against doctors are clogging the courts. 70% of these are dismissed without any payment; of those that go to trial, 80% are won by doctors.

These data indicate that the vast majority of these lawsuits are frivolous or meritless. Adding to this insult is that it costs close to $50,000 to defend a single lawsuit, no matter how frivolous.

Yes, I can understand why doctors feel deeply wounded when victimized by these lawsuits. There would be no arguing the merits of these suits if physicians committed
mistakes resulting in injuries, which is not the case at all in most of them.

One big problem is the contingency fee system, which confers a lottery-type of mentality in trial lawyers tempted by the prospect of those multi-million dollar payouts, with fees of up to 40 to 50% of the awards.

Florida doctors are putting a constitutional amendment this Movember aimed at curbing those excessive fees, and public polls so far have been favorable. If we succeed, this may reverberate across the country.

Some advocates for malpractice reform are emphasizing that physicians will never voluntarily report errors if they feel like they’ll be sued as a result. So let’s assume that we implement reforms such that admissions of error will never be usable in malpractice suits.

Would this be enough to substantially increase the rate of physician reporting of mistakes?

I read a toss-off statment in a paper the other day that “physicians often view mistakes as a moral failing” and that this often keeps them from admitting mistakes even when their admissions are insulated from lawsuits.

I’m not sure how to react to this (obviously overbroad) statement. Many physicians take their performance so seriously that they do seem to view mistakes as a species of moral failing. But how prevalent is this?

In order to achieve high rates of physician reporting of mistakes, would we also have to have a system of anonymous reporting, to go along with protections from malpractice lawsuits?

The public might be much more willing to accept malpractice reform if they also felt that physicians were leading the efforts to reduce medical error.