Injury through surgery as “medical malpractice” is still assault, possible mob-assault and even conspiracy to commit murder or inflict bodily harm.

The rule of law is based on perspective nowadays,
and the rule is that the law be malleable.

Lawsuits are not a lottery. Real people get hurt. Real people get KILLED. That’s not the same as buying a lottery ticket. These people get hurt by doctors. If you stopped treating human life so lightly, perhaps you would not have to worry about patients suing you when you botch their surgery.

You didn’t see the Constitutional right to a CIVIL jury trial in the Constitution? It IS the SEVENTH AMENDMENT!

No wonder you get sued. You don’t read to number seven.

Here it is all spelled out for you:

In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Pray tell, Daniel, if you are really going to pretend you were disagreeing for me, how *do* you test days afterward for whether a flashlight was washed with water or hydrogen peroxide? How is it that the laws of physics can in fact change from decade to decade? You were so busy jerking your knee, you seemingly didn’t realize that you were simultaneously swallowing your foot.

That doc shows up on the statistics as still practicing. He’s just not practicine direct patient-care hands-on medicine.

Same as the neurosurgeon who stops doing intracranial work, or does it OUTSIDE trauma hospitals.

They show up as still practicing, but when you need emergency surgery, plastic surgery for trauma (as opposed to cosmetic plastics), etc., people find the doctor is not in.

My ignorance of law and the courts is vast. However, I will nonetheless stipulate that the deck is stacked against plaintiffs, and that the system is typically more-or-less just.

The important word is “typically”. The median award may well be fair (and is in fact probably unfairly in the defendant’s favor), but insurance premiums are driven by the mean. And the mean is strongly influenced by jackpot awards.

The small number of yearly jackpots also does remarkable things to the statistics. The number of awards in a given year is random: sometimes you get more, sometimes you get less, centered around the mean. For large numbers, it is fairly predictable. If you had 10,000 awards per year, the variation would be around +/-5%, and the premiums would be increased by that much. The trouble is that for small numbers, the standard deviation becomes a huge percentage. For a few awards per year, the variation is on the order of -100% to +500%! (Look up “Poisson distribution” in a statistics book if you don’t believe me. It’s why we laugh at clinical trials that have 10 patients.) So whenever a new precendent is established that allows a couple of $100M awards per year, next year’s premiums will jump by well over $500M.

Regarding doctors leaving the profession due to skyrocketing premiums, a Google News search for malpractice premiums turns up lots of info. (Standard warning: a pile of anectdotes does not equal hard data.) One recent case I read was an emergency neurosurgeon who bailed when his premiums reached over $300k/year–and he had no complaints or lawsuits. That amounts to $1200 a day for the lowest risk pool! It is inconceivable that the true amount of reckless injury is $1200/day, for a surgeon whose main job is to turn doomed corpses back into living people. In that case, he was the last one in the area, and now the patients simply have to die (or live with untreated neurological injuries). A system that routinely produces such results needs fixing, and I can understand this without knowing what goes on in court rooms.

I favor caps simply because they cannot hurt. There is no justice in giving an award so gigantic that you could live comfortably on the interest on the interest.

“By the way, Daniel, it sounds like you have a cool job.”

Yep. Trying to break the laws of physics is fun, although it can be annoying too.

Thanks for the interesting discussion.

They are still here. What they do is order their lives to avoid the risk of malpractice. You might find it hard to believe, but doctors are human beings with lives and families of thier own, and they do not like having to fact the risk of losing everything they worked for on one case. I, and most doctors, don’t care if the risk is one in a hundred or one in a thousand or one in a million. I want zero. If I don’t get zero, I will order my life to avoid the risk.

The neurosurgeons start doing more spine work in smaller hospitals that do not accept trauma. Now they do not have to do emergency neurosurgery and face the medicolegal risk that goes with it. Same with orthopardic surgeons, especially the hand surgeons.

I’ve taken myself off pediatric call, nursery call, ICU call, I’m working on ER call generally. Happy enough in the office, and the various hospital work only increases liability, does not make my any revenue. As those in primary care will attest, it’s usually a revenue DRAIN for a primary care doctor.

I have seen area hospitals downgrade their trauma status over lack of doctors to cover trauma. At the level of specialty surgeons, one or two docs gone makes the difference.

Yes, the problem occurs in the areas traditionally hard to recruit in the first place. That’s called the canary in the coal mine. The problem in my area is starting to spread to the cities. They are getting inconvenienced, the rural people are being endangered. When the cities recognize the problem, if they magically snapped their fingers and fixed the problem instantly, the rural areas would still face the problem of recruitment, it will take a decade to recruit the people driven out.

I’m seeing it in my area already, as I’ve had my own problems with getting emergency specialty care for my patients. Had to deal with a frantic, crying mother on that very issue just a couple weeks ago for her child. I’d have had more sympathy were it not for the fact that tort reform got voted down a couple years ago. If the people don’t want tort reform, they get what they deserve.

How could people ever agree on a uniform amount for pain and suffering? And how many different categories would we have?

One thing though, the tort system was designed to punish as well, in the form of punitive damages. But frankly, its very rare that punitive damages are awarded in a medical malpractice case against a physician. Against a facility is far more likely.

Glad you pointed that out, though. If you’ll notice many of those states who already do have caps, Missouri for example, also are going through the same “crisis” that states without caps are.

Makes you wonder why more caps would change anything.