I wish President Obama could meet one or two of my clients who are victims of medical hit-and-runs. When the President tells the American Medical Association that he is open to curbing the rights of injured patients to sue in court, he shows that he just doesn't understand either what they go through or how important their lawsuits are to protect the safety of other patients.
Medical hit-and-runs happen when a patient is gravely injured or killed by preventable medical error, but then the doctors and nurses pretend nothing happened. This occurs every day across America. Most patients lack the wherewithal to tell the difference between preventable harm and the normal "stuff happens" consequences of the disease they started with. So a policy of denial can quell embarrassing questions, at least for a time.
But when families find the truth, sometimes by accident and sometimes by hiring a lawyer, the trust and confidence these families had reposed in their caregivers vanish in an instant. Medical injury compounded by betrayal carries its own peculiar kind of pain: searing and long-lasting.
Why do victims of medical hit-and-runs need the right to sue in court? Certainly, the money is part of it. Financial compensation in court sometimes is the only way to stave off bankruptcy when a serious injury has destroyed someone's ability to work and left the family with an unending stream of medical bills.
Lawsuits are part of the healing process from medical injury. When an injury has attacked someone's dignity and identity, the ability to haul the betrayers into court and demand accountability is a powerful tonic. Not so much for revenge, but out of the feeling, as so many of my clients tell me, "I just don't want to see this happen to someone else."
By exposing incompetence and flawed system structures, hit-and-run victims help contribute to safety reforms that protect everyone.
If medicine had a well-oiled safety system, maybe we wouldn't need lawsuits. The problem is not too many lawsuits, but too many people getting hurt and killed because medicine has barely begun to take seriously patient safety. A full decade into the 21st century, our medical industry denies that patients have any legitimate role in monitoring and enforcing the safety of their own care. A complex structure of confidentiality and "privilege" laws ensures that safety reviews are conducted in secret and never reported in any publicly accessible forum.
The statistics released by the system do not support the medical industry's claim that robust enforcement of patient safety is taking place behind closed doors. Hospital peer review is the latest example. New data from the Department of Health and Human Services show that 49 percent of U.S. hospitals have never reported a single sanction against any physician's privileges to the national data bank to which they are required by law to report. This despite the fact that the same law was written twenty years ago to block patients from ever finding out the contents of any individual report. Patients just cannot understand peer review reports, the medical industry successfully lobbied Congress.
As for medical licensing boards, most of the serious discipline involves low-hanging fruit like practitioners who abuse drugs or alcohol or molest their patients. A study of medical boards' responses to criminal convictions found that two-thirds of the doctors convicted of insurance fraud received only non-serious penalties. Serious discipline for patterns of negligent harm to patients is rare.
Meantime, the system-wide efforts to address the pandemic of medical error all rely on voluntary efforts and the good will of well-meaning medical executives. When greed or arrogance or just short-sighted cost-benefit calculation frustrates reform, patients have only one recourse to force attention to safety: file a lawsuit.
Does the threat of lawsuits cause doctors to order unnecessary tests and treatments? This "defensive medicine" argument from the medical lobby has been around for a while, and objective reviewers like the General Accountability Office have never found any solid proof that defensive medicine even exists. The proof that it doesn't comes from the "reforms" that some states have implemented to crack down on patients' lawsuits. Texas and California, for example, have eliminated nearly all malpractice lawsuits, yet aggressive, procedure-intense medicine thrives in both states, making them among the most expensive in the nation for medical care. What drives high costs in medicine is the fee-for-service payment system that rewards doctors who order the most care, not those who order the most thoughtful, most effective care.
Hurting patients by failing to follow basic safety rules can be undeniably expensive for medical providers - and it should be. Our broken system needs lawsuits to force accountability and to bring urgency to the safety message. And that can potentially save billions. If the President and Congress focused on safety first, instead of costs first, we could create health care reform that would help everybody.
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By contrast, in case the proposed provisions with respect to the strong public option, medical IT, increased efforts in prevention
To date, private insurers have coexisted profitably with Medicare and Medicaid for many years.
Basically, healthy society leads to better productivi
A doctor destroyed my arm with his negligence when I was a child. I not only received ABSOLUTELY NO COMPENSATI
The AMA doctors these days are mostly a PR org. Notice their main concern about healthcare reform was whether their bottom line was affected !!! SHAME ON THEM !!!!!
FIRST, DO NO HARM !!! CARE ABOUT THE PATIENT FIRST AND FOREMOST !!!
Just last year the Bush administra
Do medical mistakes happen? Yes. Because doctors are humans. Should a medical mistake be pursued in court? Yes. However, for every attorney fighting for justice for a patient who suffered from medical mistake, there are more frivolous lawsuits from"ambul
Could doctors do better? Yes. But the trial lawyers of america make a lot of money pursuing malpractic
I realize that most of the posters think doctors are the enemy and the worst people in the world, but the majority of doctors are not. We are trying to practice medicine by doing the best for our patient within a system that uses the words doctor-pat
I have had several unpleasant [and a couple of life-threa
1) US doctors--a
2) Within the "business model that provides patient care," doctors make little or no effort to treat the patient in any preventati
Such does NOT make them EVIL people; it does, however, clearly identify a strong trend with US physicians that suggests the majority are driven by profit rather than providing the best patient care, which in turn drives down the level of effective care for all patients treated by such a physician.
I am sorry about your experience
Blame rampant greed of lawyers and outrageous medical school costs. Not the Doctors.
I know now that the only way for one to get an "infected hematoma" inside of one's belly is for the hospital staff to have put the infection there. And while the operating doctor was on vacation, his "helper" doctors were afraid to get involved with his "mess." They,almos
Even with malpractic
here in Texas they voted in a $250,000 recap , supposedly to limit the cost of malpractic
Keep up the good work attourneys - it is only your efforts that keep doctors from becoming total savages and hospitals from becoming butchersho
but honestly there needs to be an assessment and improvemen
this has little to healthcare reform, which is absolutely necessary. tort reform and addressing medical mistakes need to be addressed for the benefit of all. but these can both be handled after healthcare reform.
LOSER PAYS, I say.
Jon E. Lewis
www.LFLMla
the rest of what you said is fairly accurate.
But frivolous lawsuits do occur quite often. And there is very little done to prevent them.
One the most common and highlighte
One of the problems is that parents can sue ObGyns up until the child is 18. SO any problems can be attributed to the ObGyns. Many of these are issues that have no specific cause and effect. And yet when lawyers use sympatheti
It's a problem on both sides, and it needs to be looked at from both sides. Blaming one or the other is careless and doesn't honestly address the actual issues.
You have absolutely no idea the harm that takes place in hospitals .In fact it is de rigeur among nursing professors to to take a companion into the hospital with them to prevent the usual "comedy" of errors that is so common amongst medical profession