Articles Posted in Medical Negligence

Interested in knowing some more info on health care costs? See Rebecca Blair’s post on our Medical Malpractice Blog.

You won’t believe the difference between med mal settlements and judgments in the United States and Canada.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has ruled that the State’s $350,000 cap on non-economic losses is unconstitutional under the State’s equal protection clause.

An excerpt: “The court must presume that the legislature’s judgment was sound and look for support for the legislative act. But the court cannot accept rationales so broad and speculative that they justify any enactment. “[W]hile the connection between means and ends need not be precise, it, at least, must have some objective basis.[Footnote omitted.] While we adhere to the concept of judicial restraint that cautions against substituting judicial opinion for the will of the legislature, we do not abdicate judicial responsibility. To hold that a rational basis exists for the $350,000 statutory cap on noneconomic damages in medical malpractice cases would amount to applying a judicial rubber stamp to an unconstitutional statute.”

More later – I have got to get to work.

You won’t believe how many people died last year as a result of hospital acquired infections in Pennsylvania hospitals.

Go to our Medical Malpractice Blog at www.medmalblog.com to find out.

Want to know how at least one defense lawyer plans on defending a brachial plexus injury case? Go to our Medical Malpractice blog.

Here is a fascinating article from the Cato Institute on malpractice and malpractice reform. Pass it around to your friends – and your legislators.

Consumers and trial lawyers have been saying for years that if doctors would do a better job establishing standards and policing their own there would be less injuries and death and therefore less malpractice claims and (maybe) lower malpractice insurance.

The anesthesiologists figured this out and today, in constant dollars, they pay less for malpractice insurance than they did 20 years ago.

More importantly deaths have have dropped from 1 in 5000 cases to 1 in 200,000 to 300,000 cases.

This is a fascinating opinion.

Defendants in medical negligence cases try to argue that, say, because a bowel is perforated in 15 in 10,000 cases of a certain surgery it was not negligent to perforate the bowel in the subject surgery.

The Supreme Court of Virginia just ruled that that evidence could not be introduced and that that argument could not be made.

There is yet another article that provides more data undermining the alleged need for restrictions on the right of patients to sue negligent health care providers.

According to the abstract of a study published in Health Affairs “we used data from the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) to study the growth of physician malpractice payments. Judgments at trial account for 4 percent of all malpractice payments; settlements account for the remaining 96 percent. The average payment grew 52 percent between 1991 and 2003 (4 percent per year) and now exceeds $12 per capita each year. These increases are consistent with increases in the cost of health care. A preoccupation with data on judgments, extreme awards, or specific specialties results in an incomplete understanding of the growth of physician malpractice payments.”

Almost every week there is another study that demonstrates that the so-called “crisis” is one manufacturered by the insurance and health care industry. The current “crisis” is about over; the next one will be occur in about seven years.