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| Malpractice insurance | | Date Created: Apr 07, 2005, 11:37 PM |
 Couple of things on the malpractice litigation front.
The non-profit malpractice insurance company in Colorado (COPIC) held a mock malpractice trial seminar this past Wednesday (4/6) and simultaneously announced that there would be no rebate of unused funds from malpractice litigation the previous year. This effectively raised the rates for doctors in Colorado.
Colorado has a huge reimbursement problem because of the percentage of managed care type medical insurance companies, but has done comparatively well in malpractice insurance premium rates because of tort reform (mainly caps on certain types of "damages"). Of course if malpractice costs (to defend and pay judgments) are low in Colorado and the malpractice tort litigation system is all about policing bad doctors, preventing all those medical errors we hear about, and compensating all those victims, then good doctors must congregate in Colorado and the bad doctors go to malpractice crisis states like Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Illinois.
But of course the tort litigation system in the US, particularly as it relates to doctors, is not about policing bad doctors. It's about making money. The plaintiff attorney in the mock trial said so. Of course they mean a financial judgement for their poor, injured client, but the jury is not allowed to hear that most of the judgment the jury hands out goes to court costs including the hired gun "experts" and a huge chunk of the rest goes to the plaintiff attorneys. Thus the jury doesn't know that the plaintiff attorneys have a HUGE financial vested interest in the outcome of the trial and will say or do anything they need in order to win.
The mock trial was based on a real trial, and it turned out the defendant surgeon was the father of the lawyer that was the defense attorney in the mock trial (not the real trial). Such trials commonly takes three weeks or more. This one boiled down to a single letter -- the letter "s". The defendant surgeon left off the "s" in his dictation which allowed the plaintiff attorney to claim that the ligature the surgeon tied around a vessel (that subsequently bled) was a single suture and not the type of double suture used for such things which meant the vessel wasn't tied off correctly which resulted in the patient bleeding after the operation which meant the surgeon was negligent to the tune of 1.5 million dollars.
The surgeon could readily show that the word "ligature" without an "s" meant the same type of tie that he and everyone use all the time and that bleeding after surgery is a known risk and potential complication after surgery of the type the patient had even if everything is done perfectly.
But something bad happened. Someone has money to go after. And the plaintiff attorney stands to get a lot of it if he can convince the jury to award someone else's money. After seeing some of the mechanics of such trials and hearing what all is involved in time, money, and effort over something that could and should be handled by someone without a vested interest in the outcome, my thought was that if doctors handled medical care or cases this way, we'd never get anything done. And all that talent and training and intelligence of doctors would be wasted.
The good news is that in the real trial, the doctor was acquitted. And the amount of malpractice insurance I pay? About $40,000 a year. But then it goes to such good use... |
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