Patients Need Protection From Doctors, Not Vice-Versa
Doctors around the country are complaining about the rising costs of medical malpractice insurance, spurred on by political groups and even their own American Medical Association (AMA). The answer, they say, is to limit the amount of money that can be awarded for “non-economic” damage (e.g. pain and suffering). In this misguided theory, reducing payouts will reduce insurance premiums. This is just not true, and this myth has been disproved in several independent studies.
But rather than protect doctors from “frivolous” patient lawsuits, government and industry organizations should be focusing on preventing malpractice from occurring in the first place. Every year, 44,000 to 98,000 hospitalized Americans die from preventable medical errors, according to a report released by the Institute of Medicine (IOM). These errors range from misdiagnosis to medication mistakes to surgical procedures on the wrong body parts. The Annals of Internal Medicine reported 27 instances of invasive procedures performed on the wrong patient between April 1998 and December 2001 in New York State alone.
The cost of these medical errors to patients, their families, and the economy is astounding. Based on IOM study data, preventable medical errors result in an estimated $17 billion to $29 billion in damage each year. (In comparison, medical malpractice insurance costs only $9.6 billion for all health care providers.)
What makes these stories and figures more horrifying is that a relatively small amount of offenders make up the vast majority of cases. The National Practitioner Data Bank reported that from September 1990 to the end of 2003, 5.4% of doctors were responsible for 56.2% of medical malpractice payouts. Further, just 2% were responsible for almost one-third of the payouts. 83% of all doctors did not make a payout of any kind.
Yet only 5% of doctors who had two or more malpractice payouts have been formally disciplined by their state medical board. Although the percentage of disciplinary actions goes up with each additional settlement against a doctor, less than a third of doctors who had 10 or more payouts were disciplined. And unlike car insurance, malpractice insurance does not tend to go up as sharply after a payout. Clearly, there is no incentive for these doctors to clean up their act – and no real threat of removing them from practice and away from innocent victims no matter how incompetent their practices.
If you or a loved one is a victim of medical malpractice, you need to have expert representation. Call attorney David I. Fuchs at 800-570-2858.