quote:
Originally posted by needtoknow:
Ekpolk, What's your take on this article from the CATO Institute?
http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv14n4/reg14n4-newhouse.html
It's an interesting stab at a topic that's so complex that to do it justice from any perspective would require a book, not an article of this length. While again, I'm not a med-mal lawyer, I do have a couple observations.
First, patients are inevitably going to get hurt by medical errors, sometimes very badly so. The question then becomes who is going to be responsible to pay the resulting costs. We as a society have to decide who will bear these costs and how. If the lawyer haters ultimately get their way, these costs are not going to go away, they are just going to fall to the taxpayers or the health insurance premium payers. Personally, I prefer a system that puts responsibility on the shoulders of the person who causes the injury (or the insurance company paid to bear this risk). If we as a society do decide to go with some form of no-accountability system, we just need to understand that the cost will still be there, it will just get shifted to someone else.
Second, one thing the article missed is that insurance companies factor a lot of non-claims related matters into their premium structure. In particular, they often seek to increase rates when their corporate investment returns don't come in as well as they'd like. So, an increase in premiums is not an indicator that claims paid are out of control, rather, you need to dig and see what's really behind the decision to increase rates (which will always be blamed on, of course, the lawyers).
Third, doctors have already had great success in getting the system tweaked to their liking. In the end, these tweaks don't solve the real problem, which is that they still make mistakes. Florida is a great example. In order to file a malpractice suit against a doctor, you first have to go through what's called the "pre-suit screening process." In effect, you have to litigate a mini lawsuit to prove your that you have the right to file your real suit. The net effect has been that all small and many medium-sized malpractice cases are now dead on arrival as a matter of economics, not justice.
As an example, let's say your doc messes up an operation, and to correct his error requires another $15,000 surgery, and you are out of work for six months, thus loosing another $35,000, so your total economic losses alone are roughly $50,000.
This case will never see the light of day. Your doc will tell you to pack sand and so will his insurance company. They will because they know that the cost of presuit screening and trial will eat up so much of your damages that it won't be worth any lawyer's time to prosecute your case because they'd lose money doing so.
Is this the way things should be? We can have our opinions about that. Just remember that this money WILL come from somewhere. Either the victim's health carrier, if he still has one, will pay (so they just got forced into the role of paying for the doc's malpractice) or the taxpayers will foot the bill for indigent medical expense and probably welfare and unemployment benefits as well.
So what's worse, accountability or the lack thereof???
