As frightening as it is to think of doctors making mistakes with impunity, we find something distasteful about making money off those mistakes. It is like putting a price, or worse, getting rich off the death or injury of a loved one. There is also a sense that by expecting doctors to perform these risky procedures it's a bit unfair to "punish" them when something goes wrong. After all, we all make mistakes at work, only our mistakes usually aren't life and death matters. And now, these frivolous lawsuits for "every little thing" are driving up our healthcare costs and in my state of Pennsylvania, so they claim, driving doctors out of business.
It sounds to many of us like the payouts on some of these malpractice suits are ludicrous, and we are often told that the bigger the payout the more the lawyer gets out of it. Law, especially litigation, is not my field so whether these payouts are "ludicrous" and whether most malpractice suits are "frivolous," I don't know. I do know that in a country where it so easy to end up without coverage for your medical costs, we are putting the cart before the horse when we ask people not to sue over an illness or injury caused by their physician or hospital that could end up costing them millions of dollars in healthcare costs.
If you suffer an illness or injury due to malpractice that forces you to leave your job, you are without coverage just like anyone else. You also now have a pre-existing condition. If you are able to hold onto your medical coverage, your costs could very likely exceed the lifetime cap and you could end up paying the rest out of pocket. All because your doctor made a mistake.
The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology estimates that "obstetricians can expect an average of 2.53 medical malpractice lawsuits to be filed against them during their career." We always need to be careful with such statistics. That doesn't mean that every obstetrician will be sued at least twice in his career. Two or three could be sued 100 times and it would skew the average. Be that as it may, I have read that doctors who deliver babies are at far more risk of being sued and many have stopped doing it.
In the article I link to in the above paragraph they imply that the reason for so many suits is that everyone wants a healthy baby and normal delivery. When this can't happen we want answers, in other words, people sue out of anger and perhaps grief. Knowing intimately a family with a child who was severely brain damaged at birth I can give you another reason. Raising a severely disabled child can be difficult and expensive. Just the red tape of getting necessary services usually requires one parent to stay home full-time. Both those injured at birth and in later years by malpractice may have to purchase a new home that is more accessible, and even then it will require certain renovations. Special vans will be required for transportation, and while most of us assume our financial obligations to our children will end at some point when they go out on their own, these parents' physical and financial obligation never ends, not even at their death, when they must have some plan in place for the child's continued care.
Of the two people I know who filed a major lawsuit, one for malpractice and one due to an accident caused by an uninsured motorist, neither did it to get rich––and neither of them did get rich. They sued as a last resort to pay the bills. While I can't quote statistics, I'd bet that more often than not, whether it's a man who fell from his ladder while painting or a woman given the wrong medication in the hospital, the story behind the story, the story that will not be reported on CNN or Fox News or screamed about on the blogs, is that these people had medical bills they couldn't pay and suing to get someone else to pay was their only choice.
Certainly all the malpractice suits have had a detrimental effect on our healthcare. Some question how much they actually add to cost, but they have caused doctors and hospitals to cover their mistakes. If we recognize that mistakes will happen, it would behoove us to encourage healthcare providers to come forward with their mistakes as a way to eliminate them. However, until we live in a society where the victims will not be punished by huge costs, tort reform before healthcare reform is putting the cart before the horse.
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