You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Uncategorized' category.
Submitted by Hal Williams, Broker at The Keane Insurance Group
Georgia lawmakers may revisit medical tort reform during their upcoming session, depending on how the state Supreme Court rules on two challenges to major legislation passed four years ago.
The justices heard arguments in September in a case attempting to overturn a cap on pain-and-suffering awards in medical malpractice lawsuits. Then in October, the court heard a second case focusing on the burden of proof emergency room patients should face in malpractice claims.
The $350,000 cap on non-economic damages and limits on emergency room liability were key provisions in a comprehensive civil and medical tort reform bill enacted by the General Assembly in 2005.
If the Supreme Court declares either or both unconstitutional during the 2010 legislative session, Republican leaders will move to rewrite the law to keep those safeguards intact, said House Majority Leader Jerry Keen, R-St. Simons Island.
He said the law has prompted more doctors to move to Georgia, reduced medical malpractice premiums and increased the number of insurers writing malpractice policies.
“It has served us well,” Keen said Dec. 1 during a speech sponsored by the Georgia Public Policy Foundation. “If we don’t have reasonable tort limits in place, the road to economic recovery will be harder.”
Republicans made tort reform their top priority after the 2004 elections, when the GOP captured control of both houses of the General Assembly.
Senate Bill 3 was introduced at the beginning of the 2005 session in January and given final passage on Valentine’s Day. Gov. Sonny Perdue signed it just two days later. Continue Reading via Atlanta Business Chronicle
Millions of Americans receive implanted cardiovascular devices such as pacemakers and stents, but many of the devices are not subjected to rigorous safety and effectiveness research before being approved for use, found a study released Tuesday.
It’s common for such devices to receive the Food and Drug Administration’s acceptance using information from only a single study, which “raises questions about the quality of data on which some cardiovascular device approvals are based,” said the authors, from the University of California, San Francisco.
Such scant scientific data does not constitute the kind of high-quality evidence for safety and efficacy that doctors and consumers expect, the authors said, but they stressed that their findings don’t mean cardiovascular devices are universally unsafe. The study was published in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association.
In recent years, the FDA has increased its scrutiny of drugs prior to granting approval. But far less attention has been directed to the approval process for medical devices, said Dr. Sanket Dhruva, a co-author of the paper and a medical resident at UC San Francisco.
“In general, there is very little data on the strength of evidence for device approval whereas there is a lot more on pharmaceuticals,” Dhruva said. “We didn’t expect that all the devices would need multiple studies or randomized studies. But we were surprised that so many devices were approved on the basis of a single study.” Continue Reading via post-gazette.com
Exactly why didn’t the Illinois Supreme Court rule on the med malpractice case this month?
The legislation in question is undoubtedly controversial — but popular with docs and the public. It also stood a reasonable chance of being struck down by the court.
Let’s jump back to 2005.
“Illinois’ unbearable medical litigation crisis forced me to actively look outside of the state to practice medicine,” explained Dr. Andrew Roth, an obstetrician. “The signing of this legislation allows me to stay and take care of my patients.”
So observed Dr. Roth in 2005. At the time, state lawmakers passed sweeping medical malpractice reform.
Prior to the legislation, Illinois distinguished itself as being somewhat of a hot zone for malpractice litigation. Between 1998 and 2003, damage awards for pain and suffering in Cook County grew by 247%. For someone like Dr. Roth, moving to Wisconsin could see his med malpractice insurance premiums drop by up to $100,000 a year. Illinois hospitals, particularly in rural areas, had difficulty finding specialists in a host of areas.
The Medical Malpractice Reform Act capped non-economic damages at $500,000 against doctors and a million dollars against hospitals. Premiums fell and specialists like Dr. Roth stopped contemplating a move out of state.
Needless to say, the legislation had one great loser: trial lawyers. They argued (no agenda here, of course) that it undermines separation of powers.
In 1976 and in 1997, the State Assembly had actually passed similar legislation – only to see the caps struck down by the Supreme Court of Illinois.
Jump ahead to 2009, and it appeared likely that the Supreme Court would again hesitate on the caps, as a lower court had already done. Except, the court never ruled.
Why not? Continue Reading via FrumForum
LAWMAKERS debating health care reform in recent weeks haven’t been reticent about blaming trial lawyers for driving up the nation’s medical costs by pursuing large malpractice awards.
Trying to fend off any limits to patient lawsuits, the lawyers decided to press their arguments in a new location — the subway system here. Lawmakers and their aides arriving on Capitol Hill by Metro, as the subway is known, pass through a blizzard of brightly colored ads on the platform and the walls and hanging from the ceiling.
They bear the lawyers’ message that nearly 100,000 people die each year from medical errors, and that tort reform won’t fix the health care system.
“We wanted a prominent space to educate key people about the number of people who are killed annually by medical errors,” said Anthony Tarricone, president of the American Association for Justice, formerly known as the Association of Trial Lawyers of America.
The lawyers, who introduced their subway campaign this month, anticipated that they would be a target for senators looking to control health care costs, said Mr. Tarricone, a Boston plaintiffs’ lawyer. During the debate, several senators introduced amendments, including one called “loser pays” — meaning the person who loses the lawsuit must pay all the legal costs — to clamp down on medical liability lawsuits. None was adopted.
The trial lawyers argue in the ads that patients need legal recourse because preventable medical errors are the sixth-leading cause of death in America, killing at least 98,000 people a year. (The ads’ tag line is: “Tell Congress to Put Patients First. There Are 98,000 Reasons Why You Should.”) The campaign Web site, 98000reasons.org, calls that number equivalent to two 737s crashing every day for a year — and the ads include two small images of planes. Continue Reading via The New York Times
“The statutory cap on non-economic damages was an essential piece of the 2004 tort reform spearheaded by the Governor and passed with an overwhelming bipartisan majority of the Legislature,” Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour argued in an amicus brief recently filed in the case of Double Quick Inc. v. Ronnie Lee Lymas.
Shot while leaving a Double Quick in 2007, Ronnie Lee Lymas successfully sued the Indianola-based convenience store chain for failing to ensure his safety. A circuit court judge lowered the jury award for medical costs and non-economic damages from $4 million to the state cap of $1 million, prompting Lymas to challenge the constitutionality of the cap. Barbour’s brief asks the state supreme court to affirm its constitutionality.
“The cap was partly a response to the multitude of outrageous and unpredictable damage awards being handed to plaintiffs in civil suits,” Barbour explained in his brief. “Its aim was to restore predictability and fairness to the system by setting a reasonable limit on non-economic damages, which are inherently difficult to quantify. Predictability and fairness were needed for the protection of the public welfare to prevent doctors from closing their practices, to stop insurance companies from not issuing policies, and to keep new business enterprises from choosing other states over Mississippi.” Continue Reading via PublicNuisanceWire.com
Submitted by Hal Williams, Broker at The Keane Insurance Group
It was just an average busy, stressful day at work, in May 2004, when the deputy sheriff arrived with a summons. I sucked in my breath, signed the receipt and returned to my desk piled high with charts, messages, lab results and forms. I was being sued for medical malpractice.
That was how it started. Eventually I peeked at the text of the complaint, which was riddled with accusations. Apparently, my conduct was “malicious, willful, wanton or reckless,” and I had “negligently, carelessly and without regard” for my patient’s health treated her in such a manner that she had died the previous year.
At night I lay awake going over and over what happened. My patient was a relatively young woman who had developed an aggressive colon cancer; her illness was unexpected, and her course was tragic. I felt that I had treated her as I would wish to be treated.
But now her children, whom I barely knew, were coping with their own complex emotions, which I imagined to be grief, very likely anger and frustration, and perhaps misunderstanding. Filing a malpractice suit somehow addressed this. And now it would hang over all of us for years. It was as if a noxious subtle film had settled all around, making everything vaguely unfamiliar and unpleasant. I had become a little unfamiliar to myself.
The film settled on everything at home and at work. I loved my patients and my practice, but this made me wary and mistrustful of them — and of myself. Continue Reading via The New York Times
Dec. 28–Physicians have asked a Lea County district judge to overturn a state insurance superintendent’s ruling that they say would open their practices to unlimited medical malpractice awards.
Attorneys representing several physicians’ group practices and the New Mexico Medical Society warned that even though the ruling retains protection for individual physicians under the 1977 Medical Malpractice Act, the corporations and limited liability companies medical providers organize for their practices would lose the act’s protection if Superintendent Morris Chavez’s ruling stands.
That would allow plaintiffs to sue for larger malpractice awards than the act allows by naming the practice in lawsuits in addition to the individual physician accused of malpractice, according to documents filed with the court.
Chavez wrote to medical practices and malpractice insurers last October that the 1977 act says only licensed or certified health care providers are protected by the act. Physicians and other practitioners are licensed or certified, but the business entities they form are not, Chavez wrote.
Physicians’ attorneys argue that business entities have been included under the act ever since it was passed, that insurance regulators have consistently applied the law to business entities, and that courts and attorneys general opinions over the years have approved of the practice. Continue Reading via DailyMe.com
Submitted by Hal Williams, Broker at The Keane Insurance Group
We’ve all been watching as Congress considers legislation that will “reform” the nation’s health insurance and healthcare delivery systems. The debate will probably continue long after Congress acts, but here’s what you can do now to prepare your medical practice for a health system transformed by massive demographic and regulatory changes.
In a recent MGMA Webinar (free for members) I explored 15 strategies that practices should consider during these changing times: Continue Reading via MGMA In Practice Blog
I am truly amazed, given all the discussion and press regarding health care reform, at the U.S. Senate’s failure to pass HB 3590. Known as ”lawyers cap fees,” this bill received little or no mention in the news media except for the weekly recap of federal legislation voted upon, as noted in the Dec. 13 paper.
This legislation would have limited the amount of contingency fees which lawyers could receive in medical malpractice cases and would have capped it at one third of the first $150,000 of the judgment, plus one quarter of judgments over $150,000. The vote was 32 for and 66 against, thus defeating this legislation and yes, both of our Pennsylvania senators voted against the bill.
Tort reform has been an item of discussion for the last 20 years and failure to address it is one of the major reasons for driving up the cost of medical care. Medical professionals are all being gouged by malpractice insurance to cover ourselves. Although it receives lip service during every political campaign, when the chips are on the table, the lawyers have their way and defeat any attempt to alter the status of tort reform. And yet the physicians and dentists are being accused of driving up the cost of our services so now we must ”reform” the way we practice. It is amazing that the legislators can dance around this issue when it is convenient for them to do so, only to stab the medical community in the back when the vote is taken; and further, that no press coverage is given to the issue. Continue Reading via The Morning Call
Submitted by Hal Williams, Broker at The Keane Insurance Group
Mississippi’s tort reform, passed in 2004, has helped reduce medical malpractice claims by as much as 90 percent.
Reform booster Dr. Kenneth Stubbs believes that more can be done statewide and nationwide.
“We need to see tort reform across the board, and unless there is uniform tort reform, there will never be a complete impact,” said Stubbs, who won the Natchezian of the Year award in 2008 for his tort reform efforts. “The whole nation must subscribe to this.”
Gov. Haley Barbour called pre-reform Mississippi the “judicial hellhole for jackpot jury verdicts.” The hellhole within the hellhole was Jefferson County, where a pharmacist was named in more than 1,000 lawsuits. In one case, a Jefferson County jury awarded $1 billion to the family of a woman who had taken the drug Pondimin, a weight loss remedy known as fen-phen that is now off the market.
Five years ago, Mississippi legislators put a $500,000 cap on pain and suffering or non-economic damage awards in medical malpractice cases. Stubbs laments that the change has gone unheralded. Continue Reading via PublicNuisanceWire.com
