“My patient lived – so she sued me.”
A frivolous lawsuit is filed after a physician suggested hospice care, but the patient lived. Although the majority of lawsuits that do go to trial are won by the physician, the mere act of being involved in a frivolous lawsuit is quite disruptive. Lawyers are paid to be in the courtroom – physicians are not. Every minute spent at depositions and hearings is a minute taken away from what doctors do best – which is patient care. Simply another way the patient loses with frivolous lawsuits:
I still have bitter feelings toward that attorney, though. I wonder if he appreciates or cares how such a nuisance suit can disrupt a doctor’s life, and cause him significant “pain and suffering.” Since this is a small town, I’m sure I’ll run into him at some point, and perhaps I’ll address the matter directly with him.For me, this case was an exceedingly stressful and time-consuming experience. I’m still upset that despite having helped Millie through her difficulties, and thereby extending her life, I was wrongly accused of negligence. Ironically, if she had passed away sooner, I probably wouldn’t have been sued.
Related posts:
- Reasons not to become a doctor
- How malpractice suits affect physicians
- Former med-mal lawyer: "Fewer than 10 percent of cases were the doctors fault"
- Medical Justice vs RateMDs
- Does telemedicine reduce malpractice risk?
- John Edwards and tort reform?
- A frivolous lawsuit is dismissed with prejudice
{ 27 comments }
Unfortunately we don’t have a legal system in play that regularly puts attorneys through a similarly disruptive process in their lives for engaging these frivilous lawsuits. I will however support anyone who is in pursuit of it.
Sorry you had to go through this.
We can, and should, decide as a profession to deny elective care to medmal plaintiff lawyers and their immediate families, and their employees. Not out of retribution, but as a risk management tool. It’s a safe assumption that these people are far more likely to file a lawsuit if there is a bad outcome, and minimizing exposure to their care is a way of reducing our risk. Note that I said elective care only, we still have to treat them in emergent situations. They can get all the care they need from the hired guns they use to serve as “expert” witnesses against the medical profession.
JB, you should quit making so many assumptions. Do you practice medicine making as many assumptions about that as you do the law?
As the doctor who wrote this editorial well knows, the plaintiff’s lawyer is NOT paid to be in the courtroom if he loses. He is NOT reimbursed any of the costs he is out. He is NOT reimbursed for his time in the case. Filing a frivolous case is a time and money waster for the plaintiff’s counsel. He’s not like the attorneys who work for the defense, who have millions of dollars backing them up and get paid win or lose.
Of course, we are just getting one side of the story, which naturally you are all inclined to believe.
Tisk Tisk,
Look at the lawyers comment above. Yowza! Being a medical student, I feel like the medicine that we are going to be practicing is prevenetive medicine. We are preventing lawsuits!
Personally, I think the solution is simple. There are too many lawyers, they will do ANYTHING to get money because the need to. Simple decrease the size of lawschool classes. For example, harvards law class has 500. Think about a medschool class of 500, that is just way to big.
.Alois
(Eagerly waiting a reply from a JD)
And as far as the post by JB You are right online. I agree with you totally.
I agree, there are too many. Fortune 500 companies, insurance companies, etc. have far too many lawyers at their disposal to do their bidding. I think I read the other day that AIG had 700, that’s right SEVEN HUNDRED law firms on retainer. That’s not just lawyers, but firms. Too many lawyers paid $250+ an hour to represent the wealthy, the powerful.
Hopefully, alois, as a med student and not yet a full fledged physician, still has the capacity to educate himself. He might learn that many people with law degrees don’t practice law, many more only handle transactional matters and never go to court, many do things like estate planning, many more only litigate specific areas, like family law or white collar crime, and a very, very few represent plaintiffs.
Plaintiffs, you know, people just like him who may be in a bad situation through no fault of their own and with no one to turn to. And certainly no money to plunk down on a $250+/hr attorney to help them get justice. And certainly not the resources to take on the employer of that tractor trailer who ran him down and is now claiming it is his fault. Or that physician who screwed up but refuses to acknowledge it but now leaves him facing mountains of bills for past and future care and lost wages no way to pay for any of it. Or that manufacturer of the defective product that injured his child and has billions of dollars at risk if their product is proven defective. But who knows, maybe he is on the Forbes list and he can just pay for all this out of his pocket.
Maybe as a student he’ll do some investigation on his own, and not buy into the climate of fear propagated by insurers. Maybe he’ll even read this article that Symtym posted and I mentioned below:
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1115197516213
Maybe he’ll even attend the class and educate himself before he goes out and trashes another profession with barely an ounce of knowledge about what goes on in the courtroom. Or trashes those people who serve on juries, people just like him, his friends, and his family.
It may be too late, now we can only hope. Dare to dream, I say.
I agree, there are always a few bad apples in each profession. Doctors, lawyers….. etc.
But when I have to pay malpractice insurance costing upwards of 80 grand a year, I start to ask myself why? The answer is so simple and so clear.
Why do I have to run every preventative test known to god for a sore throat. Because I don’t want do get sued. Does the patient need those extra tests, probably not, does it increase the costs to health care, probably.
Do med students think insurance companies are propagating an ideology based on fear of lawyers? No. They don’t need to tell us, you can ask ANY of our colleagues. Some, lawyers, not all, are hawks and opportunists. They might as well stand outside of the ER with their business cards. Our profession is loosing respect, simple because we are getting sued left and right. Are we the fall guy?
Patients forget, LAWYERS forget, that we DEDICATE our lives to helping others live, sometimes to the point where our personal lives are being affected. We feel terrible when a fetus dies because the mother was a crack addict. Just don’t sue me because I needed to get an extra MRI scan on the mothers brain during her pregnancy to see if she actually did have a brain bleed while she was trippin’ during her 3rd trimester. It’s not my fault she was so strung out while she was in the machine that the scan was blurry and needed to be repeated. I am fully aware that radioactive waves are bad for the fetus, but c’mon, after 30 plus weeks of being subjected to crack do you think an extra 5 min of radio waves is what made the kid turn out like this. Common sense use to have a place in society. But dollar signs apparently took the place. Sue the doctor, the fall guy of the 21st century.
BTW We don’t enjoy getting and extra 12 years of education to make the same amount of money as some putz that fell of the turnip truck last week. We deserve more. But unfortunately that is the case, since we have to “protect” ourselves with insurance payments from her to the wazoo. Don’t try to convince me that there is a “climate of fear” created by insurance companies when the problem is a clear as daylight on the top of Mt. Everest.
One thing I know, a few bad apples have screwed it up for both lawyers and doctors.
.Alois
Alois,
A couple of things. In your long discussion there, I didn’t notice anything in there about your future insurer. Do you know anything about them? Do you have any idea how profitable med mal is historically? Do you know what they pay their execs? Do you know whether they manage their investments correctly? Do you know how diligent they are in making sure their insureds are competent? Do you know any of this?
I bet you also didn’t know that probably the most statistic based industry in the world is the insurance industry. They know everything about you, and they have a model that assesses it all. But they only share with you what they want you to know.
You say the source of the climate of fear is clear? Why? You’re in med school. You’ve never been sued. You don’t even know how many suits were filed last year, the year before, etc. You don’t know how much the payouts were. All you know is what you gleaned from newspaper articles and AMA bulletins probably. Do you think that’s an accurate source of info? Surely you’ll do a more rigorous examination before coming to a conclusion than that in your professional life.
You have no clue what goes on in a law office, or how one even starts a med mal case, and you’re complaining that people forget about the importance of what you do? Do you understand why a med mal case would be the worst kind of cases to file frivolous suits on?
You deserve more? You will be practicing in what is on average the most highly compensated, by a long shot, profession in American society. People generally revere you. They have no understanding of what exactly you do much less how you do it and put their complete faith in you. Hell, juries revere you. Because a few (and you don’t even know how many) lawsuits are filed on cases you’ve never even seen one medical record on all the sudden you feel under attack? You need to dial down the persecution complex a notch.
Are you being devalued in a way? Sure. But not by patients. They need you more than ever. You’re devalued by the screwed up way we fund health care in this society. Patients, we have no idea how you get paid or what you do. We have no idea how to tell a good physician from a bad one. And you don’t have time to tell us if you want to get reimbursed. It’s crazy. But the only thing anyone is doing to combat this is to demonize people who have been injured and the people who represent them. That’s it. It solves nothing but removes some exposure for insurers. It doesn’t improve reimbursement rates, it doesn’t produce more time for you with your patients, it doesn’t do anything for the physician.
It’s too bad that class I mentioned earlier isn’t required. It’s clear the misconceptions in medical school are being fostered early.
By the way, insurance isn’t just to “protect” you. It’s to compensate those you may injure, unintentionally or not.
No one PLANS to roll through a stop sign and hit someone. No one plans to follow too close and rear end someone. It’s an accident. But we have to pay for our mistakes when they fall below the standard of care. It doesn’t make us bad people because we were momentarily inattentive. It makes us human.
For some reason, those in the medical profession can’t possibly fathom that they might make a mistake which would severely injure someone. Or if they can, they don’t see why they should have to pay for it.
Obviously I touched on a personal subject with you.
Lets see about my history. Father is a brain surgeon, brother is a brain surgeon, sister is an oby/gyn. Lets just say that have been sued quite a number of times, never lost a case.
p.s. I could care less how much insurance company execs make. I know i wouldn’t have to pay malpractice insurance (which is slightly over a quater of a mill alrady in my family) at the price that it is now if you Lawyers would just go do some thing else. Don’t give me lines about how good lawyers are for the consumer, nobody believe that.
Don’t be so condecending to. Take a chill pilll…. or are you gonna sue me for prescribing that?
and if it wasn’t so late, I probably would use spell check. but you don’t even deserve that.
The husband in this story is a jerk, that’s sure. I had a couple like that and remember the feeling. In my case, I involved the children from day one because of the noncompliance and then discharged the patient from my practice, for the same reason. These days, I have no mercy for noncompliant patients, especially when they insist to keep their family out of the loop. These patients are a promise for disaster.
I have a guess the main problem in the case was a lack of communication and a clash of personalities and we have only one version of the story but even then, we should not have to go through such BS in a well organized and fair legal system.
As a comment to a previous comment, I would have never gone to medical school if I would have known how the system works. But I was an ignorant teenager with a good brain no MD in the family. And now I am a wider but stuck parent of three.
Sorry for the typo from my previous post – actually, not just a typo
.
Sorry for the typo from my previous post – actually, not just a typo
.
LOL.
ZZ
Wherever you go on the www, whenever anyone posts anything critical of the legal profession, you can count on a barrage of lawyerly verbiage from Curious JD, defending his profession against any and all accusations that lawyers might be a teensy-weensy bit responsible for some of our society’s difficulties. All I can say in response to his torrent of non-sequiturs is, consider the source.
Also, if he could read my post (the 2nd one in this thread), I emphasized that my position (against providing elective care for members of the medmal tort industry) is borne not of malice or retaliation, but as a risk management tool. Refusing to deal with a torter for elective care is no different than an OB referring a high risk pregnant woman from his practice to the university clinic, or deciding not to do a particularly risky procedure any more, or, more generally, taking the diving boards away from public swimming pools. It is a rational response to protect one’s interests in the legal climate that the trial bar has created for our society.
I am not attacking the entire legal profession (like many physicians, I have several fine ethical lawyers in my family). I am attacking a small but influential segment of lawyers that eagerly pursue clients af alleged malpractice (check your phone book, google medical malpractice, or turn on your TV), leading them on with dreams of major cash recovery while knowing that >75% of them will go home with nothing but years of hopes and dreams down the drain, willing to absorb these lost cases because they know that over time, the lawyer will score enough jackpots to earn many times what the average doctor earns. To argue otherwise is to believe that attorneys are economically irrational beings.
Alois, one of the things you should consider as you choose your eventual area of practice is finding a way to make yourself invisible to the torters. If you can find an office based specialty, no hospital can force you to buy medmal insurance. Find a state that will let you practice without insurance, and find a lawyer that will help you protect the assets that your labors allow you to accumulate, and set aside a few dollars to pay a lawyer to defend you when the inevitable lawsuit comes in. In the first set of questions that you will be required to answer (lawyers call them interrogatories), there is always an inquiry into your insurance coverage (funny how that matters). When they find out that you are not low hanging fruit for them to pluck, see how fast they drop the suit.
You say the source of the climate of fear is clear? Why? You’re in med school. You’ve never been sued.
Are you saying that, unless a med student is sued, he can’t clearly ascertain the source of the climate of fear?
You don’t even know how many suits were filed last year, the year before, etc. You don’t know how much the payouts were.
The point of the post is that the mere act of being involved in a frivolous lawsuit is quite disruptive. The number of filed suits, and the payouts are irrelevant. One frivolous lawsuit, even one you win, is one lawsuit too many.
All you know is what you gleaned from newspaper articles and AMA bulletins probably. Do you think that’s an accurate source of info? Surely you’ll do a more rigorous examination before coming to a conclusion than that in your professional life.
Medical sources of information are accurate, as they’re based on evidence and facts, as opposed to, for example, lawyerly turns of phrases, manipulation, or innuendo. And surely you’ll do a more rigorous examination of your own before lecturing a med student on his professional life.
You will be practicing in what is on average the most highly compensated, by a long shot, profession in American society.
That is incorrect. The average compensation (assuming no other expenses, other than the malpractice premium) is ~$22/hr. The med student, will be practicing in what is, on average, the most poorly compensated, by a long shot, profession in America.
Hell, juries revere you.
Also incorrect. The physician’s professional peers are automatically excluded from medical cases. Moreover, lawyers deliberately select the jurors most amenable to manipulation. Even coming from a lawyer, to proclaim juries revere physicians is a stretch.
Because a few (and you don’t even know how many) lawsuits are filed on cases you’ve never even seen one medical record on all the sudden you feel under attack? You need to dial down the persecution complex a notch.
Aw, how refreshing, a naive lawyer! The reason the med student feels under attack is because he is [sorry, couldn't resist]. He feels under attack because, as a med student, he’s had contact with the current practice of medicine, and he’s training to become a doctor. Nothing else is required in order to note the actual persecution experienced by physicians. Also, you need to dial down the condescension a notch.
We have no idea how to tell a good physician from a bad one.
And we have no idea how to tell a good lawyer from a bad one.
It doesn’t improve reimbursement rates, it doesn’t produce more time for you with your patients, it doesn’t do anything for the physician.
Read the post again: Every minute spent at depositions and hearings is a minute taken away from what doctors do best – which is patient care. Simply another way the patient loses with frivolous lawsuits. Frivolous lawsuits hurt both patients, and physicians. All we can hope for is that lawyers don’t set their sights on puppies next. [I know, I know, gratuitous, yet irresistible, dig.]
No one PLANS to roll through a stop sign and hit someone. No one plans to follow too close and rear end someone. It’s an accident. But we have to pay for our mistakes when they fall below the standard of care.
Invalid comparison. If you follow the “standard of care” for a stop sign, or driving behind another car, you are assured a certain, positive, if you will, outcome. Not the case in medicine. Just because you follow the standard of care doesn’t mean there won’t be an adverse outcome.
For some reason, those in the medical profession can’t possibly fathom that they might make a mistake which would severely injure someone. Or if they can, they don’t see why they should have to pay for it.
You’ve no understanding of the practice of medicine. Part of being a physician is not only fathoming you might make a mistake, but actually living every moment of every day with the knowledge of that reality. A doctor who makes a mistake automatically pays in long-term [I dare say, permanent] emotional pain and suffering. You know, the same pain and suffering lawyers are so fond of. Oh, wait…I forget. That only exists for lawyers’ clients. When it comes to doctors, as you so eloquently put it, the only thing that matters is how deep their pockets are (aka how much can they contribute to the lottery).
Alois,
Let me address your comment first. You say lawyers aren’t for the consumer? Can I ask you, in any of the scenarios I proposed earlier, where you or your family is the victim of someone else’s negligence, where would you turn for assistance? We both know there are some bad physicians out there. If one of them injured your child severely, to the point that you were looking at literally millions of dollars in future care, plus loss of income to you and your spouse as you have to cut back your work to care for the child, who would you turn to? What would you do? Would you not hire an attorney? Would you not be glad there was someone out there who would take your case, even though you can’t afford to pay them by the hour, hire experts, etc?
JB, you’re a fool for turning down members of the plaintiff’s bar. One, because they’re the only friend you’ve got if you’re stuck in a situation like I described above. (Although maybe you and yours are so indestructable that bad things won’t happen to them).
And two, because they know exactly how difficult medical malpractice is. Most lawyers who handle those types of cases turn away 50 for every 1 they take. Of course, with your vast knowledge of the law and you’re clearly superior risk assessment skills, you knew that, right? By the way, jb, in this “climate the trial bar has created” did you know that tort filings have declined over the last decade, and average awards have fallen? Again, your superior fact checking skills have failed you.
Ema,
1. I’m not suggesting that a medical student cannot assess the risk. But let’s be honest, most physicians have no clue about what goes on in a courtroom. They think they know, but 90% have never been in one. What’s more, they have no idea what goes into the plaintiff’s side of a case. That’s why that article I mentioned earlier was so important.
2. You’re right, one frivolous lawsuit is one too many. However, not a single tort reform proposal addresses so called “frivolous” suits. And it appears from reading most posts on here, that physicians have an uncanny ability to tell a “frivolous” lawsuit by reading a press release or newspaper article without ever seeing a single medical record. How is that possible?
3. The AMA is no more accurate than ATLA. They’re lobbying organizations, and rare is any study in this debate that isn’t tinged by politics. Although I will say, for probably the most fair assessment of the whole issue, Medical Economics does an excellent job here. All sides would do well to read it.
http://www.memag.com/memag/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=141338
4. Physicians’ average yearly compensation, according to the Dept. of Labor, is higher than any other profession. It outstrips lawyers’ by nearly 50%. Rangel posted the stats last month or the one before. Check his site for the link.
5. Do you think that only plaintiff’s lawyers pick juries? That there aren’t defense lawyers there too? Do you have any idea how juries are picked? How many strikes out of the jury pool do you think they get? If juries don’t revere you, how do you explain the historical 80% win rate? This belief that juries are just simpletons there to be fooled illustrates the incredible arrogance of physicians. As if others cannot comprehend their greatness. Is it that hard to determine when someone operates on the wrong side of one’s brain? Misreads a report resulting in a double mastectomy?
6. What does telling a good lawyer from a bad one have to do with anything? At least with us, you can call the state bar and find out who has been disciplined and for what.
7. Are all doctors wonderful? Do none of you know any hacks that you wouldn’t send your family to? If you don’t want to go to depositions, settle the case. Hell, if you hadn’t stonewalled from the beginning you probably wouldn’t be in a case. Every minute a truck driver is renewing his license, it takes away from what he does best. Every time the engineer who rearended you is giving a deposition in your case, it’s taking away from what he does best. The argument that because you have a medical degree you should somehow be immune from the legal system is the height of arrogance. And again, you assume every suit is frivolous and every physician blameless.
8. How many cases have you reviewed the medical records in where the physician met the standard of care and still lost? I’m willing to bet none, yet you’re quite sure the majority of the cases where the patient wins were wrongly decided. Again, that’s pretty arrogant. And actually, if you and I disagree on who ran the stoplight, and we both fervently believe we’re right, the judge or jury will send one of us home with a judgment against us believing we were right. The comparison is right on.
9. The lottery argument may be the worst one. Do you really think that a case involving millions of dollars in economic and non-economic damages is a “lottery win” for the plaintiff? Do you know the kind of horrific injury it takes for a judgment of that size? Have you ever met a med mal victim who wouldn’t rather have their health?
We all pay for our mistakes. If I pull out in front of someone and kill them, I not only pay, but I suffer emotional damage from what happened. If an engineer designs a defective building or a builder’s construction is faulty and people die, they suffer emotional damage. We pay for our mistakes. Stop thinking you should be immune.
I realize you think plaintiff’s lawyers are only about the money, though, as if you work for free. Can you really not imagine ever being in a situation where you need someone to represent you? Who would you turn to?
By the way, jb, you’re right, I do respond a lot. I read a lot and don’t respond too. But I respond because I don’t like it when you guys pile on the patients, which is what tort reform is all about.
When alois says he doesn’t care how much his insurer’s execs make, that lets me know that his only goal is to stifle the rights of those who have been injured, regardless of the benefit to anyone else. He complains about his malpractice rates with no clue as to how insurance even works. It’s no longer about fairness, it’s about sticking it to the injured people. You think you’re hurting their lawyers, as if a talented trial lawyer won’t find work in another field. But you’re just piling on the weakest members of our society. And the sad thing is, you can never fathom being on the other side of that coin.
So yeah, I’m going to respond, because maybe some have a more open mind, and when they read this, it at least raises a question in their mind about this alleged “crisis” and how little tort reform actually helps physicians or patients. I have a lot of respect for physicians, and I imagine we’d probably get along pretty well other than on this issue, though. But I think the one real bonus to law school over medical school is that it requires you to see both sides of an issue. Something that is sorely lacking in some physicians.
Ema and JB,
Thanks for coming to my side! It is hard to articulate myself when I am studying neruoanatomy. Caudate. Putamen….. corticobulbar…..
My girlfriend is unfortunatley a doc too! But we are talking about opening something private in the north east. The more control we have over the practice, the more control we have over the patients. She is peds and hopefully I will be neurology. So they are both a bit more low impact than the surgeries or the oby/gyns.
As far as not getting the mal-insurance, I have never though about that, but learning from the physicians already in the field is the best way to do things. Ok, this is my last post. I gotta study!
.Alois
CuriousJD-
Thanks for proving my point. You have once again produced an impressive quantity of verbiage, without addressing my point. I’ll take it one step at a time.
1. Doctors dislike (intensely) getting sued, for a variety of reasons.
2. There is little relationship between true malpractice (doing the wrong thing medically) and the likelihood of a lawsuit being filed. The likelihood of being sued depends on how the patient feels about the doctor, and whether the patient’s lawyer believes it will be worth his time, money, and effort to file a suit, factoring in such things as how sympathetically a jury might view the patient/client and the depths of the defendants’ pockets.
3. Doctors manage their risk (exposure to potential litigation) as a matter of everyday decision making, almost without conscious thought. Transferring sick patients who are not progressing quickly enough to the major medical center, ordering extra xrays or labs, declining to do certain operations, older OBs stopping the maternity side of their practices, are all examples of this.
4. When there is a poor outcome to care, there is a spectrum of outlooks that patients and their families have, ranging from “It’s God’s will” to “I’m going to sue that SOB.” The first steps in the initiation of a lawsuit thus starts in the mind of the patient or family.
5. People who sue doctors for a living are more likely to sue if there is a bad outcome. They are less likely to say “It’s God’s will” or “I know that you did your best” if there is a possible way to spin the outcome as the doctors’ fault. They are not going to be people who understand that civil courts are poorly suited to discovering whether a poor outcome is due to malpractice or bad luck.
6. When there is a choice between caring for a patient who sues doctors for a living, or a randomly selected member of the public, the doc will be better off with Random Public than Lawsuit Larry an overwhelming majority of the time if there is a bad outcome.
7. Minimizing exposure to litigious patients by declining to see them in the first place is not different than seeing them and then deciding that it will be safer to refer them elsewhere, or getting extra tests or consultations. As I previously posted, not dealing with torters is a risk management activity. It’s not revenge.
In response to some of your other non-sequiturs:
If lawsuits were filed only in cases of true malpractice, we would not be having this discussion. Operations on the wrong side of the brain, or on the wrong patient, and similar, deserve the large rewards they get. These are very rare, and not common enough to occupy the time of your colleagues. They therefore have to go after the cerebral palsy cases, ruptured appendixes, unusual chest pain, faint to non-detectable mammographic abnormalities that are oh-so-clear in retrospect, but a matter of judgement in the real prospective world.
Yes I know of multiple cases where nothing medically wrong was done, but resulted in a large award. One of my competitors was hit with a million-plus trial verdict after one of his surgical patients had a stroke. I was deposed and reviewed the entire record, and I am certain that he did nothing wrong. I review medmal cases for a defendants’ law firm, and there is no question but that the plaintiff lawyers shop around for experts until they find one that will agree to testify in their favor, even if the plaintiff’s experts contradict each other. I have seen it as I review their depositions.
Why would I have a problem obtaining the services of a trial lawyer if I had a good case? Even if they knew of my policy of declining to care for medmal attorneys, I pose no threat to them. I am nothing but a potential profit center to them. My profession and my policies are of no concern to them.
I have tremendous sympathy for patients with bad outcomes, especially if I have been involved in their care. That does not mean that it is my fault that they are in that situation. When there is a collision at an intersection, it is obvious that one of the parties is at fault, and the jury appropriately makes a decision. In the medical setting, juries hear from persuasive experts on each side, which tend to cancel each other out. They they see the little girl with pigtails in a wheelchair, opposed by the insured physician, and sometimes their sympathy overwhelms common sense. That is a major reason why we have insurance.
Curious JD: I believe in the value and goals of torts. I oppose all tort reform, including the limits on punitive damages in the BMW and State Farm Supreme Court cases.
Let’s see if you believe in the value and goals of torts.
End all self-dealt lawyer immunities, especially those shielding them from adverse third party liability. End all self-dealt judicial immunities. Let all lawyers and judges carry insurance, see how they enjoy being sued for their errors.
This is not loser pays. This is better. Loser gets sued for deviating from professional standards of care.
If a lawyer deviates from lawyer standard of professional care, as testified to by a lawyering expert, let the lawyer be sued by the adverse third party, the doctor defendant he damaged so badly by the filing of a frivolous lawsuit.
All losing lawsuits get reported to the Disciplinary Counsel for review of any violation of the Rule against the filing of lawsuits without merit. If the DC finds a deviation, then in the above lawsuit against the lawyer, there is negligence per se, at a minimum.
If the lawyer loses many lawsuits, that will represent due warning to him about his ability level. After losing 3 lawsuits in a lifetime, all subsequent doctor lawsuits are res ipse loquitor (”the thing speaks for itself,” thus needs no real proof).
If you believe torts can improve a product or service, support the end of all self-dealt, corrupting lawyer immunities.
to the defender of lawyers..here are 3 who I have used and have been disbarred, Bing, Mason and Mastrodomenico…..hmm quite a high average for one client, wouldn’t you think? I didn’t put the state they are from out of my own self respect.
m
Wow. I’ll keep this short, because I know my comments won’t change any of the stubborn minds on this blog.
In life disagreements arise and sometimes the only solution is a legal one. My business has dealt with many lawsuits just in the first few years of operation. Sometimes the lawyers are dicks and sometimes the person I’m suing/is suing me is a dick. I don’t take these lawsuits personally, because it’s a cost of doing business in this society.
I understand that sometimes lawsuits arise, because of negative outcomes and not due to any fault of the doctor. But how’s a patient supposed to know whether the doctor did or didn’t screw up without working with an attorney. Is it easy for patients to understand and obtain information regarding their care in this archaic health care system we have?
I hate siding with an attorney (CuriousJD), but some of you docs are looking in the wrong direction to place blame.
My favorite comment on this article: “If you can find an office based specialty, no hospital can force you to buy medmal insurance. Find a state that will let you practice without insurance, and find a lawyer that will help you protect the assets that your labors allow you to accumulate, and set aside a few dollars to pay a lawyer to defend you when the inevitable lawsuit comes in. In the first set of questions that you will be required to answer (lawyers call them interrogatories), there is always an inquiry into your insurance coverage (funny how that matters). When they find out that you are not low hanging fruit for them to pluck, see how fast they drop the suit.”
That’s a sweet thought jb. Don’t give any compensation to someone you might accidentally injure.
I pay high worker’s comp insurance in my business. It sucks and there needs to be reform, but if one of my employees were to be seriously injured I would want them compensated.
Maybe we need some sort of no-fault compensation system for injured patients. Remember not all lawyers are evil. Some actually help people recover money that is owed. I dislike the lawyers that sue me, but I love the lawyer that protects and recovers for me.
Thank god I bailed on med school.
I always find it amusing when patients boast that their physician was wrong when they outlive the expectations given. In a twisted sense it is somewhat gratifying to have the be finally served with the very justice for which they are suing; after all, there is a specific remedy for the so called ‘wrongful life’ that money cannot buy. [for everything else there's mastercard]
I don’t know who said this amidst all of this talk about lawsuits – but let me ask a question.
Who do you think makes more money? The top 100 law firms in the country, all added up — or the top 100 hospitals in the country — all added up?
Alois, maybe you should get some of your brain surgeon relatives to help find your brain. (”I could care less how much insurance company execs make. I know i wouldn’t have to pay malpractice insurance [which is slightly over a quater of a mill alrady in my family] at the price that it is now if you Lawyers would just go do some thing else.”) To blame the cost of your insurance solely on attorneys and not the hideous insurance industry — and not doctors who have been negligent — is absurd.
Maybe you can explain your position to Dylan Malone. Read on.
Statement of Dylan Malone before the House Energy and Commerce Committee Health Subcommittee Hearing on “Current Issues Related to Medical Liability Reform” February 10, 2005, 1 p.m.
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee: Good afternoon and thank you for this opportunity to speak on behalf my son Ian, who died last May, never having spoken a word. The victim of medical negligence during a botched delivery, he did not live to see his fifth birthday.
Ian is not alone. Medical errors are one of the leading causes of death and injury in our nation. As many as 98,000 Americans die every year as a result of preventable medical errors according to a National Academies of Sciences Institute of Medicine study. More people die from medical negligence and mistakes each year than from highway accidents, drunk driving, breast cancer and AIDS. According to a 1997 University of Chicago study the number of injuries caused by medical accidents in inpatient hospital settings could be as high as three million and cost as much as $200 billion.
But Ian was more than a statistic to my wife and I, he was our son. You never saw a more excited father-to-be than I was in the summer of 1999 when Christine was prescribed the drug Cytotec to induce labor, we didn’t know that the drug’s manufacturer warned against the possibility of serious brain damage if used by pregnant women, but our doctor did. In fact, the drug is used in third world countries to induce abortions because it causes violent contractions. Every bottle of Cytotec shows a pregnant woman with a no sign drawn through her. To hide this from us the doctor gave us the pills in a simple brown envelope. The Cytotec caused such unnaturally powerful contractions that Ian was literally smothered in the womb; they lost his heartbeat about 20 minutes before he was delivered. A
stillborn, his little body color was more grey than blue, and he had to be resuscitated.
Because Ian’s health care providers falsified his chart to show a steady heartbeat throughout labor, made no mention of Cytotec, and listed him as breathing with a heartbeat at delivery, the intensive care unit had no idea of the severity of his injuries. This cover-up attempt probably made Ian’s outcome even worse. The resulting severe brain damage left Ian unable to swallow, so the secretions had to be suctioned from his mouth by machine. He was fed by way of a tube into his abdomen, and suffered from seizures and aspiration pneumonias. The insurance companies didn’t want to pay for his care – they coldly suggested we put him up for adoption.
Eventually we set out to tell Ian’s story to a jury. There was a settlement and we were able to provide the hundreds of thousands of dollars of care Ian needed every year. I am committed to honoring his memory by fighting to improve the system for those who will come after him. I strongly believe that there are many things we can do to prevent many instances of negligence and medical errors. I want people to know that medical negligence is a serious problem in this nation, and that instead of fixing it, President Bush wants to pass a law that would target all victims of medical negligence no matter how severe the injury or how horrible the care. This is a very important point. The backers of this radical proposal to change medical malpractice in our country would hurt ALL victims – not just those who have so-called frivolous cases. It really offends me when I hear that word. I want the President to fix the health care mess and to stop blaming victims like my son Ian. My son’s life was not frivolous. Let’s start with medical negligence and medical errors. The President wants to cap medical malpractice awards at $250,000 – I say if we’re going to have a cap – let us cap the number of people who suffer from medical negligence every year. It’s a national scandal that as many as 100,000 people die from medical errors annually.
We didn’t know it then, but the doctor who killed Ian had lost eight suits before we ever saw him, and he is still practicing medicine today. In fact, other children have been terribly injured or have died under his care since Ian’s birth, largely because the medical board refuses to act on his license, for Ian’s injury he paid only a $1,000 fine. Of course, most doctors are highly skilled and care deeply about helping their patients. However, a small minority of doctors are causing the majority of the damage, and we have to deal with this life and death issue. We also need to make sure that insurance companies don’t gouge doctors for their medical malpractice insurance premiums. Doctors should only have to pay rates that are based on what the insurance companies have actually paid out in claims. The bottom line is that I think it should be up to juries to decide whether a lawsuit shouldn’t be in court. I trust juries, not the insurance companies and HMOs. We all should. It’s one of our most valued rights as Americans. People need to know that this debate is really about protecting our constitutional right to a trial by jury. And when they do, I don’t think the American people will stand for this assault on one of our most fundamental freedoms. Nearly 100,000 Americans die every year from preventable medical errors, that’s the number we need to cap. Thank you for allowing me to be here today.
Comments on this entry are closed.