Trial Lawyer’s Free Fire Zone
July 16, 2008
In an op-ed in Pennsylvania’s Daily Local News, retired family physician Robert Poole describes what it’s like to have a target painted on your back in a trial lawyers’ free fire zone — in other words, what it’s like to be a doctor in Pennsylvania today.
Today, the pressing issue in the well-heeled suburb of West Chester is the need to open a trauma center to replace the one that was closed down in 2002 because of the medical liability crisis. This is in the same county, Chester, where trial lawyers have driven out every single practicing neurosurgeon. The county has set up a special Trauma Center Task Force to raise pubic awareness of the issue, as without major pubic subsidies to defray liability costs, the center is a non-starter. Taxpayers already pay into a state fund to subsidize liability insurance so the few remaining doctors don’t high-tail it out of state like so many of their colleagues. So once again, taxpayers are being asked to subsidize a broken system that serves no other purpose than to make trial lawyers rich.
According to Dr. Poole, when doctors from the Chester County Medical Society met with local legislators to plead for tort reform, they were told that until they could come up with the kind of campaign contributions regularly doled out by the Pennsylvania Trial Lawyers Association PAC they might as well be just spitting into the wind.
It’s estimated that the Trauma Center would save 10 to 12 lives a year – in other words, lives that are being sacrificed today to feed the greed of the Pennsylvania trial bar.
Trial Bar Touts Tiny Cut
July 10, 2008
How would you describe the medical liability climate in a state where one out of every two doctors has recently been sued? That’s Pennsylvania, where almost 12,000 out of the 25,000 full time physicians were hit with medical liability lawsuits between 2002 and 2007. Most observers would consider it a crisis, but trial lawyers think it’s just fine, thank you, and are now pointing to a 4.4% premium cut by one insurance carrier as proof that the crisis, which they never admitted existed, is now over.
Dr. Elliott Menkowitz makes short shrift of their arguments in this oped, pointing out that most doctors aren’t covered by the carrier and in any case the savings are paltry compared to recent run-ups in yearly premiums, such as the $37,500 to $167,000 hike OBGYNs have seen in the last eight years.
Pennsylvania is in the midst of a medical liability death spiral, with not a single neurosurgeon to be found in all of affluent Chester Country and 14 maternity wards closing down in the city of brotherly love in the last decade. And, we should mention, Governor Ed Rendell, often talked about as a possible VP pick for the Democratic ticket, appears to be in complete denial about the situation.
Interestingly, of those 12,000 lawsuits recently filed against the state’s physicians, less than 200 were determined to be worth of further action by the state Medical Board. Governor, can you say “frivolous lawsuits?”
Arizona Medical Experts
June 27, 2008
An Arizona law requiring that expert witnesses in medical malpractice trials actually be experts in the field they’re testifying about has been struck down in appellate court.
The law had clearly sought to end the abuse of “professional witness” doctors who make a lucrative career testifying in medical malpractice trials at the behest of trial lawyer firms and practice little if any actual medicine. The law supplemented an existing, overly-vague rule that witnesses be qualified by “knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education.” The new law insisted that expert witnesses actually practice in the same medical specialty as the defendant and devote most of their professional time to either active clinical practice or instruction of students.
The appellate court’s rationale was that legislators shouldn’t be telling judges how to run their courtrooms. But apparently the on-going charade of bogus medical experts making a mockery of their courtrooms hasn’t been enough to get the judges themselves to clean up their act.
UPDATE: Carter Wood over at PointofLaw has more.
Adding Some Balance To The CAP’s “Balance”
June 24, 2008
This item on medical tort reform is a prime example of the “balanced” approach taken by the Center for American Progress (CAP), which carefully examines both sides of an issue and invariably agrees in every particular with the trial bar.
The critical issue in medical malpractice today is whether or not to put caps on non-economic damages for “pain and suffering.” This is not academic to trial lawyers. It is a major pocket book issue for them.
For an illustration, consider what happened in Texas when that state passed medical malpractice reform in 2003. Three years later, when reforms had begun to take root, the ABA Journal ran an unintentionally revealing article about how “Texas plaintiffs lawyers [were] leaving in droves from nursing home and medical malpractice litigation in the wake of tort reform.” Many law medical malpractice firms, the article complained, were “breaking up or dropping whole practice groups.” Some lawyers had “simply retired or left the profession.
”That’s one of the effects caps can have, and it’s worth keeping in mind as lawyers and those who receive their campaign contributions blather on about how much they care about the patients. Because the other effect of caps can be vastly improved patient care, seen in Texas by the raw numbers of doctors who were once fleeing the state are now lining up to come set up practice there, creating a huge certification backlog.
So let’s take one of the “balanced” conclusions from the CAP and do a little deconstruction work: “Though medical liability premiums are lower in states with caps, malpractice insurance premiums have increased even in these states.”
Of course they have, along with prices (inflation) and incomes. But they’ve risen much less. California, the pioneer in medical malpractice reform, put caps in place in 1976. From then until 2005, liability premiums rose 322% in that state, less than one third the rates in all the other states combined, where premiums rose 1040%.
The CAP concludes that there is “no nationwide crisis.” In a sense they are right. There’s no crisis in Texas or California, where caps are in place and holding, despite repeated legal attacks by trial lawyers. In those states that have not passed caps, however, or where the trial bar has been successful in convincing activist judges to overturn them, the situation can be dire indeed, as doctors flee the state or retire early.
Pennsylvania has some of the best medical colleges in the world, but one of the worst liability climates in the country. The result is that some 92 percent of all the physicians who train in Pennsylvania flee the state upon graduation, . There is today not one single neurosurgeon available to treat the half million residents of Chester Country. Last year, Katie Couric of CBS news reported on the 14th maternity ward to close in Philadelphia in the last decade.
The CAP’s item “The Jury’s Still Out: A Critical Look at Malpractice Reform,” concludes that discussion of medical malpractice reform is only a distraction from the more important issue of patient safety. Perhaps they could tell us in a “balanced” way how you can protect patient safety if there are no doctors or hospitals or maternity wards to treat the patients in the first place.