The Georgia Supreme Court has struck down a cap on noneconomic damages in medical malpractice cases, declaring the cap to be a violation of the right to trial by jury. The case is Atlanta Oculoplastic Surgery, P.C. v. Nestlehutt, NO. SO9A1432 (Ga. March 22, 2010). Read the opinion here.…
Will the President sacrifice the rights of patients injured by medical malpractice to get Republicans to sign-off on a health care bill? Steven Olsen explains why the President should not in this article titled "Why Shouldn’t Obama Throw Injured Patients Under the Bus to Get Heath Reform? Ask Steven Olsen." Steven…
The Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance has released the 2009 Medical Malpractice Claims Report. Despite its title, the Report reveals data for calendar year 2008. This is the fifth report issued by the Department and contains more different types of data than released in previous years because of a…
Here is the most up-to-date data on medical malpractice case filings in Tennessee. Regular readers know that effective October 1, 2008 the General Assembly imposed significant restrictions on patients who want to file a medical malpractice suits. The new law, which was modified again effective July 1, 2009, requires pre-suit…
HeathGrades studies Medicare patient care in our nation’s hospitals based on 15 indicators of patient safety. Here are some highlights from the 2009 report representing data from 2005 -2007: · There were 913,215 total patient safety events among 864,765 Medicare beneficiarieswhich represents 2.3 percent of the nearly 38 million Medicare hospitalizations. · These…
The Commercial Appeal wrote an interesting story on medical malpractice litigation in today’s paper. Read it here. An excerpt: Nationwide, the number of payments physicians made for malpractice claims fell to 11,037 last year — the lowest figure since the National Practitioner Data Bank began tracking data in 1990. Adjusted…
This column from the Business Section of today’s Los Angeles Times attacks the myth that restriction of the rights of patients to hold health care providers responsible for harming patients must be a part of national healthcare reform. An excerpt: Every circus needs a sideshow, which must be why every time…
The Tennessee Supreme Court has ruled that a plaintiff who lost a medical malpractice case in federal court was not estopped from pursing a case against a State-employed doctor even though the federal court jury assigned no fault to the doctor, a non-party in the federal court action. An excerpt:…
I recently wrote this post about the certificate of merit law struck down by the Washington Supreme Court. Here is an editorial from The Olympian which supports the Court’s decision. Here is an excerpt: The justices were right to keep the barrier between the legislative and judicial branches of government.…