Managing Malpractice Costs – New York
According to two papers from the “Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics,” malpractice became “medicine’s most serious crisis” for the first time in 1975. The attempts to make over or reform medical malpractice laws have not necessarily improved the system or created better results as intended.
According to a 2007 report, U.S. citizens spent $5,267 per capita on health care in 2002, nearly $2,000 more than any other country. The American Medical Association (AMA) designated 17 states as being in a full-blown “medical liability crisis” because the current legal system couldn’t handle all of the blowback from the astounding number of malpractice cases it handles. This is true even when the patient cases are legitimate, such as when a doctor’s failure to diagnose cancer.
According to the report, the situation was forcing physicians to retire early, relocate or give up performing high-risk and necessary medical procedures. Although federal and state lawmakers, regulators, doctors, and the general public were being told by medical and insurance lobbyists that doctors’ insurance rates were rising due to increasing claims by patients, rising jury verdicts, and exploding court system costs, this was not entirely correct. Litigation and damage awards do not directly correlate to the steady rise in malpractice insurance premiums.
The Reliable Medical Justice Act of 2005, introduced by Senator Michael Enzi of Wyoming, was an attempt to reform the malpractice litigation world, and decrease unnecessary deaths, by providing up to ten federal grants to interested states for “the development, implementation, and evaluation of alternatives to current tort litigation.” However, even with that Act, the system—and the death stats—have not improved as much as was hoped. A July 2004 study shows that even with tort reform in two-thirds of the states, there was no improvement in safety: The number of avoidable deaths in hospitals alone increased to approximately 195,000 per year.
As unreliable as malpractice cases are, and as much time as patient malpractice court cases take, according to the Debunking Malpractice Myths report, doctors’ own lawsuits against employers and hospitals fare even worse: Doctor plaintiffs win only 14% of those verdicts.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and medical associations such as the American Tort Reform Association have stepped in to help manage the system. Each has spent tens of millions of dollars to work on promoting limited liability for doctors, hospitals, HMOs, nursing homes, and drug companies. Malpractice cases, such as the failure to diagnose cancer, should be assured due process of law.
