Medical Malpractice

I am really enjoying this Issues 2004 thing that Jeff got started. I may not agree with most of the comments on my blog (in fact I don't), but I enjoy reading them and trying to understand the way others think about these issues.

I know its a diversion from most of what I've been blogging about for the past year, but we are in an election year and its a big one. So please be patient with this and I'll be back to my regular beat shortly. After all, this whole blogging thing for me is a big experiment and I see Issues 2004 as a great experiment within an experiment.

So, that said, after reading the comments section, I realized that I had left out one of the points I wanted to make in my healthcare post. It was about Medical Malpractice.

As badly as I feel for the people who have lost a loved one due to medical malpractice or the people who have been maimed for life, I think the benefits to these people are significantly outweighed by the negative impact on the quality of care and the significant increase in the cost of care that results from medical malpractice.

I feel that we need to eliminate medical malpractice from our tort laws. It should not be possible to sue for bad medical practice. I believe in its place, we should have two new systems. The first is the ability to purchase medical malpractice insurance. If you are going into a serious medical procedure, you should have the option to purchase an insurance policy that pays out if you are killed or disabled. That may exist now for all I know. The second is a public rating system on doctors that includes risk weighted outcomes data. This rating system should establish billing rates for doctors. The better the doctor, the more they are paid. The worse they are, the less they are paid.

I know most people will think this is nuts. And I also realize that many of the right wingers who've been nailing me for my liberal views will think I've finally come around. But they are wrong about that. I am just interested in anything that will make good medical care available to everyone. And I think eliminating medical malpractice is an important part of that.

Comments

[rick gregory]

No, no, no. Voluntary/optional malpractice insurance just caters to middle-class and above people who are having elective procedures. What about poor people? Let's say the one-time premium for this insurance is $100 for $1M. You and I would pony up a couple hundred or so to protect our loved ones, but someone who makes $16k? They may not HAVE that $100.

And then what if the procedure isn't elective. The actor John Ritter's family is suing the hospital that treated him, alleging malpractice. Now, I don't know the facts here, but I'm assuming that Mr. Ritter didn't get up and say "hey, maybe I'll a torn aorta today, let's buy some malpractice insurance."

This is all a long-winded way of saying that we'd need to make such insurance a part of the standard medical insurance you proposed and compensation would need to be reasonably generous.

[jackson]

My girlfriend will kill me for this, but we are an overly litigious society, and anything we can do to streamline this sort of thing is good.

[Cee jay]

As a victim of medical malpractice, whose testimony the Pa. Superior Court called perjurious, let's not throw the provebial baby out with the bathwater. To say that the patient should purchase insurance in case the doctor is a bad one is ludicrous.
The fact is, from my experience, that neither medical societies nor states sanction the bad doctors. The names are not given out of the recidivists and it is my understandinig that a large portion of malpractice is committed by recidivists.

In my case the surgeon, last I heard (which was a number of years ago) had over 13 med. mal. cases against him. That is not to say that all are legitimate but this doctor, for instance, has no problem in his biography of telling about allowing 'ghost surgery' where a woman died after the resident operated. The surgeon who was the one who was supposed to do the operating was not only not in the OR, he was not in the hospital.
Based on the records, part of the reason I was permanently facially disfigured was that it was most probably a case of "ghost surgery" (The records don't jibe and his son was having an emergency appendectomy across town at the same time I was in the OR.).

Car insurance is mostly in case you cause an accident; No-fault allows that both may have caused the accident. To say, essentially, that you have to protect yourself from a doctor is totally antithetical to the way medical care works, i.e. you need ot have faith in your doctor; the presumption is that you can trust him/her - not that you can't or no one would ever go to a doctor.
Thank you.

(My book A Pained Life, while a story about the struggle of living with and fighting against chronic pain, also details the story of thids doctor and the behavior that led to the medical malpractice and negligence claim. http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.asp?bookid=18435

[Dan]

Timely information about the malpractice crisis:
http://badpractice.blogspot.com

[insurance]

thai Insurance: "The Importance of Travel Insurance
By: Karen Zastudil "

thai insurance: "What Is Term Life Insurance?
By: Tim Gorman "

thai insurance: "How Do I Lower My Auto Insurance Premiums?
By: Tim Gorman "

[finger]

http://dcconline.org/wwwboard/messages/6767.htm bagsdignityxeroxed