Unless of course you’re a patient injured by malpractice who doesn’t have a job at the time. Then you’re royally screwed.

Health care in those states is no cheaper for the residents. Perhaps you meant physicians and their insurers?

So a defense attorney at one of the largest lobbying firms in the country writes a book and is to be believed about the evils of litigation, but the people who represent the actual victims of malpractice aren’t?

Hmmm.

The Big Lie approach: The truth does not seem to be this
land pirate’s strong suit.

On top of all this, medical malpractice suits are extremely expensive to bring and have a small margin of success. I believe this small margin of success to be the fault of poorly prepared lawyers more than anything else.

Lets cut to the chase. This tort reform effort has been an effort by a bunch of money lovin’ docs to become lawsuit proof.

Let me clear that I despise 2/3 of attorneys as corrupt extortionist land pirates who belong (literally) in prison, and the essentially unregulated trial industry is utterly lacking in justice for physicians, especially front line trauma care, emergency neurosurgery, and (the biggest goldmine) completely innocent obstetricians.

Having said this, I have to strongly oppose any linking whatsoever of liability reform with cost control. This will produce the worst of all possible worlds: no patient choice, a stifling of innovation, severe damage to private practice, intimidation of physicians via access to liability insurance, and no proper recourse for patients injured by aforementioned cost containment.

My basic assertion is that the malpractice system also protects private practice in ways most physicians do not appreciate.

If you want reform, stick to the California and Texas models. They work great for patients and physicians.

Therein lies the problem. It is the exception in medicine when a question has a clear-cut, unequivocal answer. Most questions in medicine have ambiguous answers subject to debate. There are always two sides to every controversy and the fault of the tort system is that we allow a group of layman with no medical background to settle the dispute. Doctors themselves often have difficulty defining the standard of care, why do we expect jurors to deliver fair and rational judgments? Instead the verdict is dependent on the skill of the lawyer’s cross-examination and how well the jurors ‘connect’ with the expert. When the facts are contradictory and confusing, people resort to intangibles to make their decision – was the expert convincing, trustworthy, composed, articulate – all subjective assessments of their performance on the stand. I would gladly take a system where medically correct judgments are rendered 33% more of the time. Anything is better than what we currently suffer with.

Do you not see the danger to intellectual honesty from grabbing a term with specific meaning and applying it to legal cases, but using a layman’s imprecise understanding of the term?

Frankly I think this application is done with willful ignorance, to get the emotional lurch tied to the word. I can think of dishonest reasons user’s WANT to apply a non-legal standard …even to cases that win and survive appeal.

I have to counter your assertions about evidence-based medicine. I know how you mean evidence based medicine to be used, and don’t mean to dismiss its value when evidence is adeqaute and not simply missing, or contrary to the interests of any given individual.

Unfortunately human nature has a way of perverting its proper application. Too many physicians and insurance companies look upon it as a way to avoid responsibility for treating individuals instead of herds, or exculpate themselves from payment for a treatment, or test.

And I don’t mean to single out “evidence based” treatment. More accurately thinking errors that result in mistakes and preventable harm, or loss of opportunity to treat.

A simple danger would be it’s use to JUSTIFY treatment of some larger group, that benefits the group in any way ( whether it be financial benefit or overal health of that population) at an individuals expense, or to relieve a physician of effort of understanding a patient’s particular history or risks. Evidence based medicine, depending on the “evidence” is only a guidepost, and no subsitute for clinical judgement.

The guy who was passed out in the street in DC, that the ambulance folks figured for a drunk — turned out to be a robbery victim with a closed head injury. But oh, those drunks.

Then there’s THIS episode:

The mentally disabled guy “whining” about peritonitis.

The tort system is different from the professional disciplinary system. It is very easy for an attorney to get his license yanked. It takes an act of God for a medical professional to get his license yanked, even if he IS incompetent.

The tort system doesn’t stop incompetent professionals. It compensates people who have to live with the life-long consequences of a medical professional’s mistake.

It doesn’t matter to the person totally disabled that it was a “mistake.” That person needs to find some way to make a living that was taken away by the ::shrug:: mistake.

A medical “disagreement” never results in a tort judgment. Every state I know of follows the “two schools of thought” doctrine in which, if there are differing opinions within the medical community, and the defendant physician followed one of those opinions, the court/jury must find in favor of the defendant physician.

Tort liability is reserved for breaches of the standard of care that cause harm to the patient. All of that, both the breach and the causation, must be established by expert medical testimony.

I get the author’s point, but it has nothing to do with the tort system. It has to do with unclear standards within the medical community. Is a test worthwhile or not? Lawyers can’t answer that, doctors have to. If they don’t, or it’s ambiguous, it may end up in the courts, just like every single other monetary dispute in society, as it should be.

There’s no evidence some vague “administrative” court would do any better. Every time a study has had a panel of experts review medical malpractice judgments, that panel has returned the same result as the jury in two-thirds or more of cases. Indeed, in fewer than 5% of such cases did the panel agree there was either no malpractice or no causation or both.

That’s a pretty good system. Vague references to a book — The Death of Common Sense — that itself is nothing more than a compilation of supposition and assertions doesn’t make the post any better.