Suppose that the next time you go to a grocery store or restaurant, you’re asked to sign a form guaranteeing that you won’t sue if you contract a food-borne illness from their products. Would you sign it or be so offended you’d walk out the door?
What if the management explained that according to the Centers for Disease Control, 9,000 Americans die each year from food-borne illnesses, and the payouts from all the associated lawsuits raise the cost of eating for everyone? You could do your part to lower rising food costs by signing the form. Would you?
Would you sign a form agreeing to collect no more than $250,000 for your pain and suffering if the food-borne illness you contract left you severely handicapped? If everyone else signed such a form, would you begin to worry that those who prepare and sell food might get sloppy, knowing that there were no serious financial consequences if the food made people sick?
How about at your doctor’s office? Would you sign a contract denying you the right to sue your doctor if he makes a careless mistake that permanently disables you while providing emergency care? Would you agree beforehand that if a medical malpractice condemns you to life as an invalid, you won’t collect more than $250,000 for your pain and suffering? Signing that contract would give most people pause.
Unless they are stopped, state legislators will soon sign it for you.
Somewhere along the line, doctors got the idea that unlike other business owners, they should get special immunity from the costs of maintaining liability insurance. Insurance companies decided it would be great if they could pay out less to those killed or maimed for life by careless doctors.
Most doctors do a great job. Unfortunately, a small number of doctors are sued again and again for deadly and life-altering errors, yet are often allowed to keep their licenses by the North Carolina Medical Board. These doctors are the ones patients need protection from. Instead, this bill protects them from unknowing patients.
Malpractice reform supporters claim that junk lawsuits with huge payouts are driving up health care costs, but junk lawsuits are extremely rare. The median payout in a medical lawsuit in this state is $320,000. Large payouts do happen occasionally, but they are usually in cases where a patient was severely disabled or killed due to medical negligence.
According to a Charlotte Observer editorial, the average number of malpractice lawsuits filed annually in North Carolina, which has a population of 9 million, is 470. The number has declined by 25 percent in the last six years. That’s remarkable considering that 4,000 patients die and 5,700 are permanently injured annually in the state’s hospitals because of preventable medical errors according to the New England Journal of Medicine.
The new law allows the kind of damages that pay for future medical treatment and reimburse lost wages, but caps damages for pain and suffering at $250,000. Are you prepared to tell a little girl who will be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life due to preventable medical error that her suffering is worth only $250,000? That’s about $3,000 a year.
Suppose that when you take your daughter to the emergency room, you emphasize repeatedly to the doctor in charge that she is deathly allergic to penicillin. He gives her penicillin shot anyway, which she didn’t even need for her broken toe. She dies.
Under current law you can sue. If this legislation passes, you can’t, because medical personnel will now be given immunity from “mistakes.” Emergency room personnel could only be sued if they deliberately hurt someone, or intentionally put them at risk — like by showing up to work drunk or high on drugs. That’s an almost impossible standard to meet. Exactly what legislators are trying to fix with this bill is unclear. The Winston-Salem Journal reported last week that medical malpractice insurance rates in the state have stayed the same or declined in recent years. Even the bill’s supporters acknowledge that it won’t lower medical costs. And the number of doctors in the state per capita is increasing, not declining.
So remind me again, why do this to patients?
This article appears in Mar 1-7, 2011.
You make some good points. It sounds like the bill might need to be tweaked some more. 250,000 might be too low for some injuries but on the other hand multi million dollar awards for moderate to trivial situations need to be eliminated. Maybe certain types of injuries could award higher amounts. I think something needs to be done was a whole for tort reform. I am happy that they are trying to do something but lawyers need to be pulled back on all fronts.
We could limit the top percentage that lawyers could charge for suits. Too many times the lawyers get all the money and the victims get the peanuts.
Carolina Dawg and Frank Griffin need to do some fact checking.
There are no frivolous medical malpractice suits in NC, because the last round of reform did away with those. You can only sue for med mal in NC now if you first get a doctor who is willing to testify that the doctor you are suing committed malpractice. That is why the number of suits has declined in NC. We have less suits than we have people dying every year due to medical malpractice.
Frank says that lawyers need to be pulled back on all fronts. You, sir, have no idea what you are talking about. Lawyers, not soldiers as is commonly believed, are the professionals who preserve your freedoms and rights in our modern day USA. You are also wrong that lawyers get all the money from lawsuits. Legal fees are always less than half of the recovery. But the expenses of a med mal case can exceed $50,000 to $100,000 because of the deep pockets that defend the medical negligence, so an injured patient does have tens of thousands of dollars in expenses in addition to the attorney fees, after a successful suit. And multi-million medmal outcomes in NC are extremely rare, so again, you would benefit by getting some actual facts to support your largely uninformed opinion.
And, Dawg, objective studies have shown that “defensive medicine” adds no more than 2% to the overall cost of medical care. There is a much higher cost added by doctors who will send you to get a diagnostic test at a facility that they personally own. That is where the cost of medical care is getting inflated.
Doctors do pay a lot for malpractice insurance. Let’s blame the victims for that. That is what the Republicans in the state legislature are doing. Actually, malpractice cases can all be avoided—that is the definition of medical malpractice. It is a preventable medical mistake that hurts or kills an innocent patient. Rather than try to reduce those mistakes, the Republicans are taking away the right of the innocent victim to either be compensated at all (emergency room malpractice) or to be compensated fairly (the damage cap for all other med mal cases).
The sponsors say this bill will increase the number of doctors who want to come here to practice medicine. They are right about one thing— letting emergency room doctors off the hook for their preventable errors will cause every bad doctor in the USA to want to come here to NC to practice medicine in our Emergency Rooms, where they are not responsible for killing or maiming innocent patients. So we will attract bad doctors to NC with this bill for sure.
Law boy needs to read more closely before running off with the mouth.
The only thing being limited is the pain and suffering portion but I guess thats where lawyers really like to stick it to people I guess. Limiting this one area is not going to make NC a meca for bad doctors.
Having a doctor sign onboard will limit but not eliminate trivial lawsuits but you make a good point. This of course does nothing for the other 49 states or in Obama’s case the other 57 states.
When I say pull back lawyers on all front I mean all front not just medical and not just in NC. Those tobacco lawyers did pretty good from my understanding. Many times the laws of these class action cases get millions and the actual victims get a coupon for 1 dollar off some product hehe.
In a biz that takes 1/7 of our entire economy a 2% savings is pretty important. You really need to work on your math a bit. Instead of attacking Dawg why not agree with him and say yea know what we also need to tackle this issue because it is an even bigger amount.
Why do you think they call it practicing medicine? It’s because it is not an exact science. People are all slightly different and we are all human so mistakes and deaths will happen.
Rather than this law being an attractor for bad doctors, I think this bill will be a repellant that can keep more of the evil ambulance chasing lawyers away from NC.
Which do we want more of doctors or lawyers? I think we all know the answer to that one.
We do not need lawyers to preserve our rights. Lawyers like to make the language difficult for the average man to understand as a barrier to competition but joe blow can defend himself in court. I give credit to the founding fathers but not much to ambulance chasers like you.