June « 2009 « Raycain's Blog

IsItTimeToReformMedicalMalpracticeLitigation?

June 29, 2009

American health care is the envy of the world, but with rapidly rising health care costs, reforms are needed to make high-quality, affordable health care more widely available. Americans spend proportionately far more per person on the costs of litigation than any other country in the world. This is a threat to health care quality for all Americans. Increasingly, Americans are at risk of not being able to find a doctor when they most need one because the doctor has given up practice, limited the practice to patients without health conditions that would increase the litigation risk, or moved to a state with a fairer legal system where insurance can be obtained at a lower price. This broken system of litigation is also raising the cost of health care that all Americans pay, through out-of-pocket payments, insurance premiums, andfederal taxes. Increasingly extreme judgments in a small proportion of cases and thesettlements they influence are driving this litigation crisis. Veiw Confronting the New Health Care Crisis: Improving Health Care Quality and Lowering Costs by Fixing Our Medical Liability System at:

http://aspe.hhs.gov/daltcp/reports/litrefm.pdf

The Bush administration published Bush’s Medical Malpractice disinformation Campaign: A Rebuttle to the HHS Report On Medical Liabilty, to veiw the campaign visit

http://www.citizen.org/documents/Bush_Disinformation_Campaign.pdf. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) argues that although the United States has a health care system that is the envy of the world, it is a system that is to be brought to its knees by aggressive attorneys who force the medical community to practice costly defensive medicine. Jackson Williams, legal council for the watchdog group Public Citizen, charges that the position taken by HHS is factually incorrect, incomplete, or misleading and even contradicted by other governmental agencies.

The Institute Of Medicine(IOM) identified medical errors, not medical liability lawsuits, as the nation’s true malpractice problem. The HHS report cites only the IOM’s proposal for voluntary reporting of “near miss” medical errors, whose non- implementation it blames on lawyers. The report does not mention IOM’s findings about the death toll and the $17-29 billion in annual costs attributable to medical errors; nor its proposals for mandatory reporting and recertification of providers.

Center For Disease control(CDC) estimates that some 2 million hospital patients acquire infections that result in 90,000 deaths each year. One CDC expert says that “many hospital personnel fail to follow basic infection control, such as hand washing between patient contacts.”

http://www.citizen.org/documents/Bush_Disinformation_Campaign.pdf

According to Robert Hunter, Director of Insurance for Consumer Federation of America, “The total cost of medical malpractice premiums is $6.4 billion (not just for doctors, as the report says, but for doctors, hospitals and other facilities). This represents about one-half of a percent of total health care expenses. In other words, if an outright ban were placed on medical malpractice lawsuits the total savings would be about $6 billion. The idea that a cap of any kind can save $60 to $108 Billion is pure rubbish. How in the world could ‘defensive medicine’ possibly be more than equal to the total risk measured in premiums, much less 10 to 20 times the risk, as HHS assumes? This makes no economic sense at all.” The costs of the “runaway litigation system” are leading to “higher taxes.”

Should healthcare regulators raise the bar for new and upcoming physicians and doctors to lower the chances of malpractices? should malpractice victums held accountable for choosing these physicians? Should government fight to make it easier for physicians to meet annual insurance premiums?