Why is Shadowfax’s physician group settling baseless lawsuits?
What can we do? When you are at Yellowstone, they tell you not to feed the bears because it just encourages them. But that metaphor doesn’t work when the alternative is to let the bear maul you and hope that he won’t get all of your food.
What is more concerning is the lengthy process of the proceedings. Patients who are legitimately injured do not receive timely compensation.
Shadowfax suggests health courts. This can work, but only if the process is streamlined. States like New Hampshire who have a pre-screening panel comprising of doctors and judges cannot find physicians who will testify, further delaying decisions.
No-fault malpractice will work better. Rather than physicians complaining about jackpot awards or misguided lay juries, the debate should be reframed to focus on timely compensation to legitimately injured patients.
The current system does a piss-poor job at that.
Related posts:
- Browbeating plaintiffs bringing baseless malpractice lawsuits
- The candidates on tort reform
- My take: Malpractice, age management
- Sore loser
- Op-ed: Injured patients deserve medical malpractice reform
- No-fault malpractice
- More on why health courts make sense
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{ 5 comments }
It does a piss poor job because your liability carriers don’t pay in a timely manner regardless of liability, and you physicians are loathe to call out your own, regardless of their incompetence.
You advocate no-fault, and perhaps you’re right. But like most physicians opining on subjects outside their own field, you offer little detail on how this would work, and who is going to administer it and more importantly, pay for it. I guess being the critic is the easy part, though. After all, you can always point to some newspaper article you read about how bad things are. Of course, no one can do that about medicine.
Hey, are you the same anonymous who commented at Shadowfax’s site? Anyway, I think no-fault or health courts are decent ideas. How would they work? Well, how does no-fault car insurance work? How do disability courts work?
You’re being disingenous when you talk about pointing to a newspaper article. There are plenty of medical news sites (e.g. medpagetoday.com) that the public can access if they wish.
(I left a longer and slightly different version of this response on Shadowfax’s website.)
If the insurers wanted no fault physician liability insurance, they would have suggested it. Why do you think they haven’t? Take a guess.
As for health courts, if you’ll notice, the proposals the insurance industry encourages the physicians to back all include caps. That’s the key to those – not the health court element. Your comparison to Social Security Disability Admin Law Judges doesn’t work for two reasons. One, the 7th Amendment. Two, are you suggesting that part of people’s tax dollars get paid into a fund which will later pay them back in the event of a malpractice claim? Because that’s how disability works.
I’m not being disingenous. Most of the “evidence” for physicians’ claims is anecdotal. From the same sources they discount when they don’t agree with them.
I consider the settling of a weak case to be treason to clinical care. One must hire a personal lawyer to totally terrorize the insurance defense attorney, the insurance company, the plaintiff, the plaintiff lawyer, and the judge.
You must demand total e-discovery and put all enemies of clinical care through the wringer.
One should continually file ethics complaints against the plaintiff lawyer, the plaintiff expert.
One must countersue where possible. One should file a cross claim against all co-defendant to prevent any from settling without permission.
One must insist that the plaintiff get excluded from the trial to avoid the emotional reaction.
One has to appeal the case as far as it takes.
If one does that, the land pirates do not come back. This is painful, but an investment in the future. The more inflicted, the longer it will take for the land pirates to return.
The subject of excluding a sympathy arousing plaintiff from the liability phase of the trial is reviewed here.
http://supremacyclaus.blogspot.com/2008/09/exclude-plaintiff-from-trial-for.html
The defendant doctor has no chance of persuading the treasonous insurance company defense attorney of this tactic. The latter wants the longest trial possible to break even. He does not want to do anything that will end the trial halfway. That is why it is imperative to hire a personal attorney who can “persuade” this insurance company lawyer, especially if specializing in legal malpractice lawsuits.
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