If you promise affordable health care, you won’t impress anyone by making it more expensive

The Colorado Springs Gazette fired off a well-aimed editorial regarding the recent move by a Senate Committee to increase the medical malpractice caps in that state. They write,
Politicians who feign support for affordable health care, while supporting Senate Bill 164, are either confused or they’re lying. Either way, they’re paying favor to trial lawyers [...]

Difficult medicine = financially dangerous practice?

This “story” about misdiagnosed heart attacks seems like a model demonstration of what is going wrong in the malpractice system. The basic factual basis for the story is that
Annually in the United States, approximately 7 million people go to hospital emergency rooms complaining of chest pain or other symptoms that indicate they might be [...]

He wouldn’t be able to do it without medmal support

This story about a pediatrician in Florida is really inspiring. It is also sobering because it reveals what is at stake in medical malpractice expenses.
Funds to serve patients without insurance — for free or for a fee of $10, $15 or $20 — come from One by One Leadership Foundation of Southwest Florida, a [...]

Raising the cost of medicine in Colorado

I had never heard of Colorado’s medical malpractice situation before reading this editorial. Apparently, the state passed tort reform back in 1988. Up until then,
Physicians faced annual liability insurance increases of as much as 73 percent. Doctors had no choice but to avoid performing high-risk procedures. They also began retiring early, and some [...]

Supremes limit liability on Federally approved health equipment

I’d be interested in seeing responses about this decision by the Supreme Court. It seems the Supreme Court has ruled that no one can fault the safety of medical equipment in a lawsuit if that equipment has been approved by Federal regulators.
Under federal law, a company must substantiate the safety and effectiveness of [...]

Polluting the jury pool by spreading fear

Lawyers make a living by winning cases. This can be good and bad. One would hope that they would only take clients who had a legitimate grievance. However, in the medical malpractice field, one way to guarantee more wins is to spread the idea in the populace that malpractice by incompetent doctors [...]

Yesterday was President’s Day

That didn’t mean much to me as far as medical malpractice is concerned. But others were more creative than I was. This is a great post about Abraham Lincoln’s experiences defending doctors in medical malpractice cases. Apparently, the basic issues that we’re still dealing with were around well over a century ago. [...]

Why arbitration could be win-win

I notice that KevinMD blogged about the same arbitration story that I mentioned a couple of days ago. He wrote,
A malpractice trial is long and laborious, and at the end of it all, patients are often not appropriately compensated for medical errors.
Arbitration would be a more streamlined process, and allow patients to be compensated [...]

The threat of arbitration?

This story seems rather negative.
Within the space of two weeks late last year, Michael and Hedy Cohen, who happen to be experts on medical errors, each encountered what they saw as a disturbing development in the modern doctor-patient relationship.
They were asked by two groups of suburban doctors to sign away their right to a jury [...]

The John Ritter case

If you haven’t seen it already, make sure you read Movin’ Meat’s Malpractice and John Ritter. He makes a really good case both that there was no negligence and that the accused would almost certainly lose anyway. Read the whole thing.  To give you a taste, below is his conclusion:
Which begs the question [...]