Most instances of medical malpractice don't lead to lawsuits. It's just too
expensive to sue a doctor unless the patient is really screwed up. In the
ballpark of $50K to $100K upfront, and nothing in return if you lose. That
tends to weed out the cases where somebody accidently gets a hole poked in
their intestine and just needs a second operation to fix it.
My wife was on a jury for a med mal case last year. A guy fell off a ladder
and broke his wrist. The docs found the big break but missed that one of the
little round bones in his wrist had flipped 180 deg. When the bone flips like
that the blood vessels that supply the bone are severed and the bone dies.
Because the wrist continued to hurt, he got 6 months of physical therapy on
the wrist before they did another MRI and found the problem.
The jury gave him zero because he would have needed the same surgery even if
they had found the dislocated bone earlier. Frankly, I have given him
something for 6 months of what had to have been very painful PT on a broken
wrist with a dead bone in there because neither of the two docs that saw him
caught the flipped bone. But juries almost always give doctors the benefit of
the doubt. It was a tough diagnosis and an understandable mistake, but it was
a mistake. I'm not suggesting the doctors involved are bad doctors or bad
people. But they made a mistake and still won the case.
The real problem with the med mal system is not that it causes defensive
medicine (although the doctors are quick to say it does). The problem is that
when there's mistake, the regular health insurance has to pay to fix it. That
jacks up the costs and there's no incentive for the doctor to get it right the
first time. Doctors are very quick to justify their fees by saying they save
lives and improve patients' lives, but very slow to own up to the human
mistakes they inevitably make. Tort reform won't fix that.
The other reason people sometimes sue is they need the money for lifetime
care. THis happens a lot in birth injury cases, where a baby is born with
severe problems that quickly use up the million dollar lifetime insurance
limit. It's not as hard as you might think to run up a million dollar medical
bill. One way or another, the patient still needs care for the rest of
his/her life and the insurance is gone. So the doctor gets sued so that the
government (Medicaid) doesn't have to pay all the bills once the person's
personal assets are gone. I'm not saying that's right, but it's not just
greed that causes people to sue. Sometimes they sue doctors to pay medical
bills.
Dave
70 Midget
> Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 11:01:38 -0700
> From: bmwwxman@gmail.com
> To: billyzoom@billyzoom.com
> CC: spridgets@autox.team.net
> Subject: Re: [Spridgets] Was: California Ammunition Restrictions NO
Spridgetcontent
>
> So we are screwed without benefit of intercourse..... The lawyers are going
> to see to it that we DO add layers of complexity which cost MORE money
> (whether hidden or overt), maintain outrageous legal awards, and at the
same
> time decrease accessibility and drag the whole thing through both insurance
> company bureaucracy and then a new and burgeoning government
bureaucracy....
>
> Oh Joy!
>
> Cheers!!
> Jim
>
> On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 8:51 AM, Billy Zoom <billyzoom@billyzoom.com>
wrote:
>
> > > Will the lobbyists let the
> > > legislature enact the tort reform necessary to control this?
> > Well, let's see. What percentage of our elected officials are lawyers?
> > I don't see tort reform in the near future.
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