Quote:
Originally Posted by RebelDarlin
And Washington completely ignored any kind of torte reform (because politicians are mostly lawyers) which could help reduce Malpractice premiums.
It's absolutely correct that tort reform has been ignored by DC. The reason for this may be that some politicians are lawyers, although we have been discussing this on one of the other threads and only about a third of them are actually lawyers. In addition, most of the state tort reform measures passed in the last few years have been written by.....lawyers.
There is however a very good reason as to why DC has failed to legislate any kind of meaningful tort reform (which not only do I support, but in a previous life actually lobbied for), and that is the the majority of tort cases are not heard in the Federal Courts. Tort claims, which against doctors are typically medical malpractice through negligence, are subject to different rules in different states, because some states have enacted reform and some have not.
Plaintiff's attorneys (personal injury lawyers) are more numerous in states that do not have meaningful reform measures on the books. Texas has a handful, they have enacted reform, Nevada has thousands, they have not (incidentally Las Vegas has a huge shortage of OB/GYNs, at one point there were only one or two covering the entire metro).
The problem comes with balancing the rights of the plaintiff who genuinely has been wronged, against the needs of society who is now being significantly impacted by a system run amok.
As I have said, I will, eventually practice law, but I'd sooner work in McDonalds than become a plaintiff's medical malpractice attorney. In all likelihood, I'm either going to go prosecutor, or corporate law. The large corporate law firms defend clients against malpractice claims, and conventional wisdom is to respond to a lawsuit against a hospital by burying the opposing counsel (who almost always works for a tiny firm) with so many motions, interrogatories, subpoenas and deposition appointments that he gets completely swamped and accepts a settlement. To do this, a large law firm will receive a lawsuit, and then assign a team of associate attorneys, who have been out of law school 1-5 years to the case, they then work at $3-500 per hour per attorney, completely overwhelming the already busy plaintiff's lawyer. Someone somewhere then gets a bill for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, the doctor's rates go up anyway because the insurer has paid out on the legal bills, the plaintiff gets about half of the settlement, the plaintiff's attorney gets the rest and the large law firm chalks up another win. That case saw a court room for eight minutes, if at all. The doctor technically won his case, because it was a no fault settlement, the insurance company is happy because while they paid out a few grand for lawyers and settlements, they didn't have a jury award millions, and all the costs get passed on to someone else.
In a state that has enacted lawsuit reform, same plaintiff goes to see the lawyer, immediately upon filing they all go before a judge, before anything else gets done. The judge looks over the evidence and decides only if someone has actually been harmed. This is similar to a preliminary hearing in a criminal case, guilt or innocence are not decided, merely is there evidence that says someone has been harmed, and is there some evidence that points to the defendant being responsible. This procedure filters out the crap. So when great aunt Mildred has had an operation on her crotch and it's gone wrong, she goes to court, and produces some medical evidence of her now damaged crotch. Judge thinks there's a case to answer, and off everyone goes.
The other area where things are badly messed up is punitive damages. Lets say we're a year down the road and great aunt Mildred has won her case, the Doctor didn't get enough sleep the night before he operated on her crotch because he was watching porn. He was tired, and made a mistake. So, Mildred gets paid for her Medical bills, to fix the crotch, she gets paid for her pain and suffering, she gets paid for her out of pocket expenses and future expenses and bills. At this point she has been made whole again, by way of monetary compensation. Her crotch is all better and she's not out of pocket any money, and she's been paid for her pain. What happens then is the court (jury) considers the amount of punitive damages to award. What should we charge a doctor, monetarily, who spent the evening watching porno, and was too tired to do a good job of crotch surgery? Well, there's two ways of looking at this. his mistake has already been expensive, should we really punish him by awarding more damages (which often are not covered by malpractice insurance? I say we should, and I say we should because I am on a forum full of truck drivers. Let's say you stay up all night, in the cab, watching hardcore midget porn, (you know you do). You get up the next day and drive the truck down a two land highway and your eyes close just for a second, and in that second, great Aunt Mildred brakes for a otter crossing the road, and bang, you hit her. She's injured and her Chevy Aveo is all messed up. She has to have an operation on her crotch, requiring medical bills and whatnot. The doctor gets punitive damages when he messes up, but he's also compensated to the tune of several hundred k a year. You don't make that, and you, unlike the doctor could have the authorities crawling all over your truck, looking at your hours of service records, your computer, where they find out you were looking and monkey porn or whatever it was, and your information goes into the big computer thing, where in the future, you can't get another driving job because prospective employers can see that you had an injury accident. Your livelihood is shot.
What we should do, is cap the punitive damages, at say $250,000. Mildred gets some cash, porno watching doctor is punished, and the damage to his livelihood is commensurate with the damage to yours if you do commit the same level of negligence and nobody is treated dreadfully unfairly.
