i guess i'll open myself up to another mass assault and jump in with a few words on the subject of medmal litigation. it's a touchy subject for sure.
dr freeze, if i understand your position correctly, you maintain that, since doctors are human like the rest of it, just because they screw up doesn't mean they should be sued for their negligent care. surely, either you are not serious or i have misunderstood you. i assume your postion would be the same say, if you took your car to a mechanic for a tuneup and he set a valve too tightly and it blew through the engine. i'm sure you wouldn't want him to bear the cost of a new engine, would you? everyone makes mistakes, right? how about the contractor that screws up the foundation of your new home, and it collapses before you move in and your homeowners coverage kicks in. to err is human and to forgive divine, right?
obviously, when someone performs a service negligently and that negligence caused another harm, there should be accountability and compensation. in the area of medical malpractice insurance, the reasons for astronomically high premiums are complex, but in the end most of them are self inflicted by the insurance industry.
let me first say that, from a legal standpoint, medical malpractice cases are extremely complex, taxing and specialized. in all states, you must first have a medical opinion that a standard of care has been breached. next, you will be required to hire experts to review records, examine your client, and give expert testimony at trial. as the client can almost never afford to defray these cost, they are borne by the attorney. it is almost commonplace for a medmal lawyer to have $30 k or more in costs tied up in a case by the time it is resolved. now imagine the lawyer has two or three dozen of these cases pending at one time. and remember, as most lawyers take these case on a contigency fee basis, if you don't win, you get nothing and absorb the loss.
some in this thread have already alluded to this, but the primary reason medmal insurance rates are so high is the same reason health insurance for me and my wife now runs $1100 per month. this has nothing to do with malpractice awards and everything to do with the rising cost of heathcare. the bottom line is that, in the medical industry, insurance costs are never more than a single digit percentage of overall cost. that is to say that the ob/gyn who pays $150 k in annual medmal premiums is knocking down more than $1.5 mil in gross revenues. poor souls. and "bad baby" cases, or cases where a baby is permanenty damaged for life by an ob/gyn's malpractice, are by far the most expensive of cases to compensate, as they usually require a lifetime of continuous medical care for the child permanetly disabled by the doctor's negligence. dr freeze, i guess your advice to these parents is to accept it and learn to live with it, as doctors are only human.
another less discussed reason for the rise in malpractice premiums is the strategy of claims management universally employed in the industry. let me say that, in any place other than a major metropolitan area, medmal cases are hard as hell to prosecute and win. doctors still carry an aura of infallibilty with the general public, and in less populated areas, they are almost always known by the juries, and it is very difficult to persuade them that the doctors made a negligent mistake. the perception that everyone who walks into court with a medmal case gets a boatload of money is simply fantasy. medmal carriers know this, and they have almost universally adopted a policy of denying liability in almost all kinds of medmal claims except the aforementioned "bad baby" cases, where the emotional baggage of a crippled baby is too much to overcome with a jury. the result of this is almost every claim is litigated out instead of settled, because they know that most plaintiffs and plaintiff's attorneys simply cannot withstand the costs and pressures of protracted litigation. the companies will therefore spend twice as much to litigate a claim than they could have paid to settle it out of the gate.
i have never done much plaintiff's work, but i did work for a couple of years for a major insurance defense firm. i'd like to share with you all my last case conference with insurance officials and senior partners over the appeal of a rather significant seven digit verdict. during the conference, as the designated go-fer in the room, i was asked how long the appeal would take in the courts. i responded that the average lifespan of an appeal through the court of appeals at that time was about 18 months. the senior partner was then asked to estimated the attorney's fees for the appeal, and did so. as i watched in incredulity, the insurance co rep at the table then calculated the interest return on the amount to pay off the claim over the expected lifespan of the appeal. when the expected return exceeded the anticipated attorney's fees, he turned to me and told me to proceed with the appeal. the merits of the plaintiff's case played no role in the determination, only the bottom line. and by the way, this was a first party claim, that is to say, this was the plaintiff's own insurance conpany, the one he had paid premiums to for coverage, making this determination. after this meeting, i declined to work on the appeal and the next day tendered my resignation from the firm.
it gripes my ass that everyone always want to blame the lawyers until it's one of their children that gets crippled or arrested. then the tune changes.
