The medical quack wrote a short post that lays out the perverse dynamics that mean escalating malpractice claims and costs:

To recoup their loss, doctors treat more patients in less time. “More patients in less time” is a toxic recipe for substandard care. Some PPO doctors treat a remarkable 30 to 35 patients a day. In a letter to The New York Times, Dr. Michael Harel comments: “Practicing under price controls, as most physicians do today under Medicare and managed care, does not leave us much choice when malpractice insurance premiums rise. In order to balance the books, one has to increase one’s daily office visits by reducing the allotted time per patient, which sooner or later will negatively affect quality of care and result in more malpractice suits.” It’s astonishing there aren’t more lawsuits.

Like you, doctors don’t have much choice. A patient can use only doctors on the PPO provider list, and doctors can see only patients who subscribe to the same managed care organization the doctors contract with. In a climate where managed care organizations decide which doctors will be on the PPO provider lists, doctors can’t build and maintain a practice based on referrals. Their reputation is not their primary source of patients. Their primary source is managed care organizations, and in the same manner managed care organizations can funnel patients to doctors by signing them to PPO contracts, so too they can funnel patients away by declining to renew PPO contracts, and there is nothing the doctors can do about it.

Even outside of PPOs, we can see how medical malpractice rates have led to shortages in doctors. That would indicate that the remaining doctors must see more patients in less time. So we have three rules of healthcare:

1. The more doctors struggle financially, the more likely they will be subject to medical malpractice lawsuits because they will be trying to work faster to see more patients.
2. High medical malpractice rates can cause doctors to make more mistakes because they are trying to pay for insurance by seeing more patents in less time.
3. In a situation where doctors are struggling financially, medical malpractice rates will make the situation worse and result in even more medical malpractice lawsuits.

This all looks inevitable to me. What do you think?