If I told you that, every week, between 4,200 and 8,400 people were poisoned by contaminated food, would you say restaurants needed special protection from negligence lawsuits because fear of such lawsuits would force them to clean too much? “Defensive cleaning,” so to speak.
If I told you that, every week, between 4,200 and 8,400 people were killed in fires caused by bad electrical wiring, would you say electricians needed special protection from negligence lawsuits because fear of such lawsuits would force them to insulate too much? Call it, “defensive wiring.”
Of course you wouldn’t. Thankfully, I made those numbers up: combined, foodborne illnesses and home electrical fires kill about 3,500 people per year. That’s one-hundredth as many people as the 210,000 and 440,000 patients killed each year by medical malpractice. But the “defensive medicine” myth — the claim that, when doctors are worried about getting sued, they start running unnecessary tests and doing unnecessary procedures, thereby increasing the health care costs for everyone — just won’t go away as a justification for “tort reform.”
The whole notion of “defensive medicine” has always been silly: doctors are held responsible for malpractice when they don’t do something required by the standard in the field that would have helped the patient. Doctors can’t be held accountable for not doing something that wouldn’t have made a difference. The notion has also always been misleading, too: as the Congressional Budget Office said a decade ago, “some so-called defensive medicine may be motivated less by liability concerns than by the income it generates for physicians…,” a point repeatedly echoed by others even in the medical field like Atul Gawande.
Yet, a quick search of case law reveals the myth’s pervasive, ongoing effect on the legal system. There are the obnoxious defense “experts” deliberately making speeches in front of juries (Pin v. Kramer, 41 A. 3d 657, Conn. 2012), legislatures enacting special laws to hinder malpractice victims (Jackson v. HCA Health Services, 383 SW 3d 497, Tenn. 2012), and federal judges who should know better than accepting the myth at face value when deciding federal tort law (Gipson v. US, 631 F. 3d 448, 7th Cir. 2011).
Continue Reading Studies Again Show Dangerous Doctors Bigger Problem Than Defensive Medicine