Medical Liability Reform

[Meta Blog]

Originally from Gus Van Horn,

Via the Protect Patients Now mailing list, medical liability reform will be up for a vote in the Senate next week. Somehow, I don't think they'd object to my reproducing the email here.

After being postponed a week, today the U.S. Senate introduced important medical liability reform legislation and is scheduled to vote on it next week. Bill S.22,

The Medical Care and Access Protection Act of 2006

, includes reform provisions which have proven to be effective at the state level, including reasonable limits on non-economic damages.

As you know, the U.S. House of Representatives has repeatedly passed reform legislation, only to be blocked in the Senate. That's why we need to make sure our voices are heard by every U.S. Senator -- right away.

Please take the time

now

to

contact your Senators

and urge them to support S. 22 and pass the commonsense reforms needed to end medical lawsuit abuse. And please remember to

spread the word

to your friends, family, colleagues and neighbors and ask them to contact their Senators using the Protect Patients Now website.

I'll be sure to keep you updated as this issue develops. Thank you for your continued support.

I looked for whether Americans for Free Choice in Medicine had anything further to say on this at their web site, but only found a short statement in support of liability reform.

Here is a PDF file of the entire bill from the link above. The summary sounds reasonable to me, but if anyone with some time and a legal turn of mind -- I only joke about being a lawyer! -- looks it over and sees problems, I'd appreciate hearing from you.

[softwareNerd]

An update: The bill failed in the Senate.

The bills would have limited damages for pain and suffering to $250,000 in most instances, with an upper limit of $750,000 for cases involving multiple medical facilities. One bill would have applied to healthcare providers generally, while the other sought to shield obstetrician-gynecologists.”

[Qwertz]

When I was still in film school, I was assigned to make a documentary. I wouldn't have done so otherwise, since I truly dislike the genre, and the professors were Communists (with a capital 'C' - they had cards!) We were supposed to make a 'portrait' of a person by following them around with a camera, and then cutting it together to make it interesting.

Being the contentious little snot I am, I did exactly that, except that I had the person I was following (my mother, a surgeon) talk constantly about the problems associated with socialized medicine and medical malpractice. It was really quite good, and by far the most watchable project in the class, as it was the only one that had an issue. And I got a C on it because I didn't strictly stick to the terms of the assignment.

Anyhow, she had a letter, which I had her read for the camera. It was a letter sent by an OB/GYN practice to other doctors in the area with whom they had done business - referring clients and whatnot. The letter told of how the practice was being forced to shut down its GYN half. Over the past two years, with no suits filed against the practice, their med-mal insurance premium had increased from $40,000/yr to $490,000, and they just couldn't continue to offer the expensive-to-insure gynecological services.

Caps, however, are more of a Band-Aid™ than a solution to the problem. The problem is the attitude of the general public (and juries thereby) that doctors must be absolutely infallable all of the time. Excessive awards are a symptom of the underlying unappreciation of the incredible difficulty of medicine.

It is also very difficult for a jury to adhere to the proper legal standard of care when faced with a permanently disabled or dead patient. But how do we separate testamony about a patient's diminished quality of life from the jury's determination of whether the doctor breached his professional duty? The only real way to combat the propensity of juries to overinflate awards to 'sympathetic' plaintiffs is to fight against the public's underlying demands for physician omniscience and equally-accessible, high quality health care. Americans have become conditioned to expect high-quality, free health care, and this attitude is driving doctors out of the field.

Caps are only a temporary stopgap against excessive and, quite frankly, wrong med-mal damages. They deny appropriate recovery to those plaintiffs who actually deserve damages, and they encourage juries to find for plaintiffs because of the perception that the law favors the defendats. But with the health-care industry hemorrhaging like it is, I think they are an appropriate temporary measure.

-Q

EDIT: I should qualify that last statement to say that I think caps, if they are to be used, should be judicial, not statutory. That wasn't really clear, and given the context of the first post, could easily be misinterpreted.

Edited October 3, 2006 by Qwertz