Insurance-Funded Congressional Representatives Again Try To Deny Justice For Patients Injured By Medical Malpractice

Some bad ideas just will not go away. A few days ago The Pop Tort noted that the new, anti-patient Congress was holding hearings on medical malpractice liability. If they had listened to the excellent testimony of Joanne Doroshow, Executive Director of the Center for Justice & Democracy, they would have realized that injured patients need more, not less, legal protection.

But the “hearings” were a sham anyway, and a few days later the insurance-backed members of Congress introduced a new plan to strip away the rights of medical malpractice victims.

Phil Gingrey (R-GA11) ran unopposed last election, but that did not stop health services companies, HMOs, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, medical device companies, and insurance companies from contributing nearly $500,000 to his “campaign.”

It seems like he is ready to pay them back. As his press release trumpets:

Senior Health Subcommittee Member Phil Gingrey, M.D. (R-Ga.), House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), and Congressman David Scott (D-Ga.) today introduced The HEALTH Act (H.R. 5), a bill that includes meaningful medical liability reforms to lower the cost of health care while strengthening the doctor-patient relationship.

The press release has little by way of facts, except for this whopper: “According to the Harvard School of Public Health, 40% of malpractice suits filed in the U.S. are ‘without merit.’”

That’s funny, since I actually read the Harvard study on medical malpractice, and it said:

The researchers analyzed past malpractice claims to judge the volume of meritless lawsuits and determine their outcomes. Their findings suggest that portraits of a malpractice system riddled with frivolous lawsuits are overblown. Although nearly one third of claims lacked clear-cut evidence of medical error, most of these suits did not receive compensation. In fact, the number of meritorious claims that did not get paid was actually larger than the group of meritless claims that were paid. …

“Some critics have suggested that the malpractice system is inundated with groundless lawsuits, and that whether a plaintiff recovers money is like a random ‘lottery,’ virtually unrelated to whether the claim has merit,” said lead author David Studdert, associate professor of law and public health at HSPH. “These findings cast doubt on that view by showing that most malpractice claims involve medical error and serious injury, and that claims with merit are far more likely to be paid than claims without merit.”

Most claims (72%) that did not involve error did not receive compensation. When they did, the payments were lower, on average, than payments for claims that did involve error ($313,205 vs. $521,560). Among claims that involved error, 73% received compensation.Overall, the malpractice system appears to be getting it right about three quarters of the time,” said Studdert. “That’s far from a perfect record, but it’s not bad, especially considering that questions of error and negligence can be complex.” The 27% of cases with outcomes that didn’t match their merit included claims that went unpaid even though the injury was caused by an error (16%); claims that were paid but did not involve error (10%); and claims that were paid but did not appear to involve a treatment-related injury (0.4%).

The title of the study’s own press release was “Study Casts Doubt on Claims That the Medical Malpractice System Is Plagued By Frivolous Lawsuits.” Who are you going to believe, a paid-for Congressman or your lying eyes?

The study did not find that 40% of medical malpractice lawsuits were without merit. The study found that one-quarter of medical malpractice victims did not recover compensation, while, at most, only one-tenth of successful claims involved injures not caused by medical malpractice — and the plaintiffs in those cases received far less than the plaintiffs who had injures which even a panel of doctors thought were caused by medical malpractice.

The system works imperfectly, but so does every system — including our medical system, which costs the economy a minimum of $20 billion just in treating medical (iatrogenic) injuries. When you recognize that our entire medical malpractice liability system costs under $5 billion a year, you realize that, all in all, our medical malpractice liability system is downright cheap, and is compensating victims of medical negligence for only a fraction of their damages.

Even if we put aside the fact that, for every dollar spent on compensating the victims of medical negligence, more than $5 dollars in damage was caused by medical negligence, it bears repeating that the overall costs of compensating injured patients is so small that it the medical malpractice liability system does not restrict access to health care. Similarly, malpractice lawsuits have not been shown to change of physician behavior — so-called “defense medicine” — even in high-risk, high-liability cases like obstetricians’ decisions to perform c-sections when the baby shows signs of fetal distress.

I could go on — like how Gingrey’s proposal of “non-economic caps” would slam the courthouse doors shut on all but a few injured patients, and even then only those patients who were earning high incomes when they were injured or died — but I think the burden of proof here should lie with the people, like Gingrey, saying there’s a “medical malpractice crisis.” So far, he can’t muster anything more than a lie about the Harvard study.

 

UPDATE: No surprise: as the NYTimes reports, it turns out that the Gingrey was, himself, a negligent obstetrician who settled, for $500,000, a malpractice case brought against him. In that case, the patient alleged that “Gingrey and two other obstetricians in the same practice failed to properly diagnose the woman’s appendicitis. Her appendix burst, leading to the loss of her fetus and other complications including a stroke, court papers show.” The patient also alleged that Gingrey lied on his medical records. In addition to losing her fetus and having a stroke, she developed respiratory distress, spent a month on a mechanical ventilator, and was left her partially disabled.

In Gingrey’s world, such a case is worth — including all attorneys’ fees and case expenses — a maximum of $250,000. Considering that the experts alone on a pregnancy, birth or delivery malpractice case like that can cost over $250,000, there’s no way any attorney would take the case if there were liability caps of a mere $250,000. There would thus be no compensation for the patient for her extraordinary and tragic ordeal, and no incentive for negligent doctors like Gingrey to actually do their jobs.

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