All the signs were there:

[Dr. Rolando G. Arafiles Jr. had] a pattern of improper prescribing and surgical procedures — including a failed skin graft that Dr. Arafiles performed in the emergency room, without surgical privileges. He also sutured a rubber tip to a patient’s crushed finger for protection, an unconventional remedy that was

Overlawyered passes along a misleading description of the "tort reform" provisions in the Senate health care bill from an anonymous Capitol Hill source:

The “tort reform” section of Senator Reid’s substitute amendment is not merely meaningless, but is actually a significant giveaway to the trial lawyers. It is essentially a 5-year, 50-million dollar grant program

Philip K. Howard, whose nonsense medical malpractice "health courts" idea I’ve panned before, is back pushing more hooey from two insurance and corporate front groups, Common Good and the Committee for Economic Development:

Because modern medicine is so complex, reliability almost certainly requires some kind of special court.  This country has a

Professor Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago published an opinion piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal on medical malpractice.

"Embarrassingly ignorant" would be a charitable description. Eric Turkewitz calls it "flat out false."

How bad was it? Turkewitz caught two outright falsehoods:

American courts commonly think it proper for juries to infer medical negligence from

Following up on yesterday’s discussion of an emergency physician’s critique of medical malpractice reform in Pennsylvania, in which the physician claimed, without any evidence, that the number of defendants in malpractice cases has risen recently, negating many of the benefits of malpractice reform.

Put simply, he missed the boat. The number of defendants does

WhiteCoat (and later Walter Olson) directed me to this op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette by Gerald F. O’Malley, a Philadelphia-based emergency physician:

… Governor Rendell recently declared that Pennsylvania’s malpractice lawsuit abuse crisis is over. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Rendell’s announcement comes on the heels of the Pennsylvania Supreme