"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." - HL Mencken
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"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." - Confucius
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"The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease" - Sir William Osler
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" The best test of a person's character is how he or she treats those with less power." - Bob Sutton
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"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them - well, I have others." - Groucho Marx
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"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
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"It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them" - Friedrich Nietzsche
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"Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple." - Charles Mingus
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"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - Albert Einstein
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"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around." - Talking Heads, Life During Wartime
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"What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. This is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary. Go and learn it." - Hillel, Talmud, Shabbath 31a
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"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing." - Thomas Sowell
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"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup." - HL Mencken
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"If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." - Abraham Maslow
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"A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not to dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves." - Herbie Hancock
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"There are no facts, only interpretations." - Nietzsche
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"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't." - Anatole France
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"In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Workouts by month - Goal 200 from 11/1/09 through 10/31/10
RT @yejnes: My thoughts on the annual exam, etc., final letter ACP Internist, March 2010 http://bit.ly/9FNcXn wel-stated & importantMarch 15, 2010 12:47
A note to the professors, from the "real" world, on the use of ICDs in a fee for service community... http://ow.ly/1jaPy - great postMarch 13, 2010 2:19
RT @paulinechen: New "Doctor and Patient"; Learning to Keep Patients Safe in a Culture of Fear http://nyti.ms/bYA14V - blog post comingMarch 12, 2010 1:35
RT @tom_peters: @kevinmd Spoken like an MD. - true primary care is very complex - it is not simple care -March 11, 2010 12:43
RT @efalchuk: Seriously, what is Nancy Pelosi Talking About? http://bit.ly/9sHSc2 #healthreform #hcr #healthcare think Dazed and ConfusedMarch 10, 2010 7:53
Obama Says Health Overhaul Should Trump Politics - http://nyti.ms/bwKRyo - and he is correctMarch 8, 2010 7:28
@BertDecker multiples of 37 - trivial - any factor of 111 would factor into the others. The key here is that 37 * 3 = 111March 7, 2010 9:00
RT @dmrind: Meta-analysis and New Knowledge http://bit.ly/awMtmT important and well statedMarch 7, 2010 12:10
I will forego posting on malpractice today. Please read the last few relevant rants – especially focus on some outstanding commentary – especially the last 3 yesterday from m, jb and Joe.
Perhaps you can make your next post a proposed table of damages – what you would deem to be reasonable compensation for “pain and suffering” for various forms of injury – in accord with your claim that such a table would make the tort system more fair.
Aaron-
A good starting point would be a multiple of what the patient prospectively thought his or her life was worth, as demonstrated by how much insurance he or she was willing to buy. Most people have minimal or no insurance, and therefore it is safe to assume that he didn’t think his life was worth much. It seems that life is of nearly infinite value only if someone else is paying the tab.
So, the most I would award for wrongful death is to match whatever the person thought his life was worth as the amount of life insurance he bought and paid for. For a lifetime of pain or disability, I would award some multiple of that, 2 or 3 times. If you wanted to be bleeding heart about it, you could give everyone an automatic $50K or so as a minimum, but then I would also want a ceiling of a million or so for the total award.
3 Responses to Malpractice
Aaron
October 2nd, 2004 at 11:06 am
Perhaps you can make your next post a proposed table of damages – what you would deem to be reasonable compensation for “pain and suffering” for various forms of injury – in accord with your claim that such a table would make the tort system more fair.
arf
October 2nd, 2004 at 5:40 pm
At our local medical school, that would be $500,000 *total* damages, as the state carves out an exemption for itself.
Only private doctors are subject to unlimited damages.
jb
October 10th, 2004 at 9:49 pm
Aaron-
A good starting point would be a multiple of what the patient prospectively thought his or her life was worth, as demonstrated by how much insurance he or she was willing to buy. Most people have minimal or no insurance, and therefore it is safe to assume that he didn’t think his life was worth much. It seems that life is of nearly infinite value only if someone else is paying the tab.
So, the most I would award for wrongful death is to match whatever the person thought his life was worth as the amount of life insurance he bought and paid for. For a lifetime of pain or disability, I would award some multiple of that, 2 or 3 times. If you wanted to be bleeding heart about it, you could give everyone an automatic $50K or so as a minimum, but then I would also want a ceiling of a million or so for the total award.