Well, there goes physician access in Illinois as doctors start heading to Texas. Lawyers win, patients lose again. (via PointofLaw.com)
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- Texas malpractice caps: Readers react
- Malpractice caps = more doctors
- Canada caps malpractice awards
- Lawyers win again, patients lose
- Increasing caps = drop in physician access
- Tort reform working in Texas
- Texas malpractice: "A case were politicians actually delivered"
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{ 5 comments }
How did patients lose?
If all the bad doctors head to Texas, I’d call that a win for patients everywhere else. I’d rather have a hard time finding a good doctor than an easy time finding a bad one.
Getting sued has nothing to do with being a bad doctor.
payne hertz obviously has no idea of the malpractice crisis.
Being sued has no relevance on th equality of the physician.
Over 70% of Ob/Gyns will be sued at some point in their career. Does that mean that 70% of Ob/Gyns are bad? I don’t think so.
While I agree that even a good doctor can make a mistake, the fact is the doctors who get sued enough times to make it worthwhile for them to close their practice and move to another state tend to be bad doctors. All the propaganda about “frivolous” lawsuits to the contrary, there tends to be a high correlation between getting sued and actual malpractice, and between actual malpractice and being a bad doctor. I can’t think of too many fields with the possible exception of running FEMA where acquiring a track record of screw ups would be considered anything but evidence of incompetence, can you?
Some 5 percent of doctors are responsible for over 54 percent of malpractice claims. Are we to assume these are the good ones? Seems to me you could cut malpractice costs in half by policing that 5 percent.
The real malpractice crisis is that over 100,000 Americans are killed and over 1 million injured every year in this country due to medical errors, and yet the medical profession refuses to acknowledge and do something about the problem or police its own ranks. Instead, it engages in scare-mongering designed to rob injured patients of their legal right to seek compensation when they’ve been harmed through negligence or incompetence.
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