Home   >   News   >   Current Affairs   >   Will Tort Reform Help Solve the Health Care Crisis? Part 1

Will Tort Reform Help Solve the Health Care Crisis? Part 1

By on July 24, 2012

Mention the word lawyer or malpractice law suit to most practicing doctors and watch the reaction you get. Many will get red in the face and become very negative and defensive.

No wonder, because malpractice suits are a common part of medical life in the US. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, over 85,000 suits were filed in 2009, the last year for which we have good statistics, and over 10,000 of them resulted in claims being paid out.

ABC News did a study showing that over 60% of doctors age 55 have been sued in their careers. This number approaches 100% when you are talking about surgeons age 60 or older.

And yet the tort system of law in the US, a form of civil law as opposed to criminal law,  is the only way patients can get compensated for damages they believe done to them through provider negligence. Criminal charges can be filed but rarely are, as the civil system is more user-friendly for plaintiffs in this kind of situation. For one thing. people do not have to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. Civil cases are often settled out of court for money.

Several alternatives to the current system have been proposed but none as yet has shown itself superior, though data is still coming in. More on this later.

In a New York State Study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in the 1980’s, likely the nation’s most prestigious medical publication, panels of experts reviewed 30,195 medical records. They discovered 1,133 adverse outcomes of which 280 were deemed due to provider error. That same year in New York, 47 malpractice claims were filed in this same area. Eight of these suits were related to the cases where malpractice was determined by the experts. Another 28 of the suits came from cases where no malpractice or adverse outcome was seen.

It is an old study but nothing published since has undermined these findings. This tells us a lot. As less than 25% of cases are found for the plaintiff, the anger against the tort system  would seem over-blown. But is it?

TO BE CONTINUED

Tom Godfrey

 

 

 

About Tom Godfrey

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

HTML tags are not allowed.