Cherry Hill, New Jersey Personal Injury Lawyer - Medical Malpractice

Myth #5: Tort reform will lower insurance rates.

Mike Ferrara — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:13:15 GMT

The campaign to slip widespread tort reforms into America’s health care bill is gaining momentum it doesn’t deserve because people are blithely accepting its exaggerations, distortions, and outright lies as fact.

To combat this, the American Association for Justice has just released a report called “Five Myths About Medical Negligence,” which exposes the tort reformers’ media campaign as the propaganda it really is.

Myth #5: Tort reform will lower insurance rates.

Fact: It is absolutely not the case that doctor liability premiums will go down if national malpractice reforms are passed. States that have already passed caps on damages have shown that while insurance companies don’t have to pay out as much in these states, they don’t pass on the savings to doctors by lowering premiums. In 2009, premiums in capped states were actually more than $1,000 higher per year, on average, than premiums in states with no caps.

Tort reforms simply don’t translate to insurance price reductions for anybody—doctor or patient. The idea that malpractice lawsuits are unduly clogging the legal system while wasting American taxpayers’ money and driving doctors out of business is absolutely baseless. On the other hand, medical negligence is very real, and any responsible health care reform bill must find a way to meaningfully address issues of patient safety.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Mike Ferrara

Myth #4: Malpractice Claims Drive up Doctors’ Premiums.

Mike Ferrara — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:31:27 GMT

Myth #4: Malpractice Claims Drive up Doctors’ Premiums.

Fact: Malpractice claims actually don’t have that much to do with the premiums doctors are paying. When Americans for Insurance Reform (AIR) conducted a study of the relationship between malpractice payouts and doctor premiums, it found that while doctor premiums have increased astronomically in the past few years, there has been no “explosion” in lawsuits, jury awards or legal fees to justify such an increase.

Rather, doctor premiums have been driven up by the economic situation of the insurance industry. When insurance company profits are suffering from declining interest rates and investments, they make up for it by charging more in premiums. This, and not malpractice lawsuits, is the reason doctor premiums have gone up so dramatically in recent years. (And by the way, according to a previous AAJ report, malpractice insurers earn more than 99% of Fortune 500 companies.)

The idea that malpractice lawsuits are unduly clogging the legal system while wasting American taxpayers’ money and driving doctors out of business is simply bogus. On the other hand, medical negligence is very real, and any responsible health care reform bill must find a way to meaningfully address issues of patient safety.

Stay tuned as the week goes on for more myths about tort reform.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Mike Ferrara

Myth #3: Doctors are fleeing.

Mike Ferrara — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:55:47 GMT

Myth #3: Doctors are fleeing.

Fact: No they’re not. Compelling data from the American Medical Association shows that the number of practicing physicians in the U.S. has been steadily increasing ever since the 1960s—faster, moreover, than the population. While tort reformers will try to spin this statistic by claiming that states with no malpractice caps are driving doctors to states with malpractice caps, the truth is that doctor numbers have increased in every state except four. Which four? Alaska, Georgia, Montana and Utah, all states with malpractice caps.

Stay tuned as the week goes on for more myths about tort reform.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Mike Ferrara

Myth #2: Malpractice claims drive up health care costs.

Mike Ferrara — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:06:03 GMT

Myth #2: Malpractice claims drive up health care costs.

Fact: Numerous studies have shown that malpractice claims have almost zero impact on the cost of health care in the U.S. As a good example, Americans for Insurance Reform released a study over the summer week showing that in recent years, doctor premiums and medical malpractice claims have overwhelmingly dropped, while the profits of the medical malpractice insurance industry have soared. Significantly, the study concludes that placing further limits on the liability of negligent doctors and unsafe hospitals would be unjustifiable, and would put almost no dent in our country’s health care costs.

The AIR study adds that because medical malpractice premiums amount to less than 0.5% of overall health care costs, with medical malpractice claims amounting to 0.2% (yes, these are tiny decimals) of health care costs, limiting liability any more will simply not have a significant effect on these health care costs. “If Congress completely eliminated every single medical malpractice lawsuit,” it says, “including all legitimate cases, as part of health care reform, overall health care costs would hardly change, but the costs of medical error and hospital-induced injury would remain and someone else would have to pay.”

The idea that malpractice lawsuits are unduly clogging the legal system while wasting American taxpayers’ time and money is simply bogus. On the other hand, medical negligence is very real, and any responsible health care reform bill must find a way to meaningfully address issues of patient safety.

Stay tuned as the week goes on for more myths about tort reform.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Mike Ferrara

Myth #1: There are too many “frivolous” malpractice lawsuits.

Mike Ferrara — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:32:23 GMT

Myth #1: There are too many “frivolous” malpractice lawsuits.

Fact: The Institute of Medicine has found that 98,000 people die and hundreds of thousands more are injured in hospitals each year due to preventable medical errors. These errors cost the health care system an $29 billion a year they wouldn’t have to spend if better prevention strategies were in place.

Despite these overwhelming numbers, only one in eight people injured by medical negligence ever files a malpractice suit. Moreover, the number of malpractice suits has actually decreased by eight percent over the past ten years, and amounts to less than one percent of the whole civil docket. Of the suits that do get filed, a 2006 Harvard study found that on average, 97 percent are meritorious, with a full 80 percent involving death or serious injury. “[P]ortraits of a malpractice system that is stricken with frivolous litigation,” the authors stated, “are overblown."

The idea that frivolous malpractice lawsuits are unduly clogging the legal system and wasting American taxpayers’ time and money is simply bogus. On the other hand, medical negligence is very real, and any responsible health care reform bill must find a way to meaningfully address issues of patient safety.

Stay tuned as the week goes on for more myths about tort reform.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Mike Ferrara

Ensuring Patient Safety Would Cost Fewer Lives AND Less Money

Mike Ferrara — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:12:56 GMT

Despite laws in New Jersey and Pennsylvania requiring hospitals to report major medical errors, unanticipated complications, and near misses to state agencies for the purpose of reducing medical mistakes, experts say that hospitals in both states are neglecting to report these kinds of incidents.

In 2007, major medical errors in Pennsylvania included accidentally leaving surgical equipment inside two separate patients at Fox Chase Cancer Center. At Abington Memorial Hospital in 2005, a woman recovering from hip surgery developed open bed sores after being left lying on a bedpan for several hours. In a total violation of state law, none of these incidents was reported by the hospitals responsible.

When serious medical errors don’t lead to a patient’s death, they require additional health care spending—often tens of thousands of dollars per patient—to correct.

"Anybody that is supposed to report close calls and has zero reports is clueless," said James Bagian, head of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Center for Patient Safety. "Management is asleep at the switch and just waiting until they kill someone." Josh Goldstein, Philadelphia Inquirer

Since 2003, though the health department has cited four hospitals in Southeastern Pennsylvania for failing to report serious medical errors, none of these hospitals has been fined.

In the current climate of sloppy enforcement, medical malpractice lawsuits are one of the only ways to protect patients against medical errors. They are also the only way to ensure that hospitals and doctors are held responsible if and when they do cause serious patient harm.

Rather than threaten patient safety and take away the patient’s right to compensation by limiting malpractice claims, health care reform needs to focus on ways to make patients safer. Insisting on better monitoring of hospital errors would be an excellent start.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Mike Ferrara

Medical Malpractice Reform: A Doctor’s Perspective

Camryn Hansen — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:58:59 GMT

If you’re getting mad about the mainstream media’s perpetual refusal to fact-check, telling you that So-and-So says X while another So-and-So says Y but refusing to tell you whether X or Y is in fact true, you will appreciate the recent Salon.com article by Rahul K. Parikh, M.D.—“I'm a doctor. So sue me. No, really.”

In this article, Dr. Parikh thoughtfully and rigorously examines the evidence that tort reformers have been touting for years as reasons why states should limit patient compensation for medical injuries. He finds that:

· We do not have an epidemic of malpractice suits in this country, and the numbers are not growing. Studies show that between 1996 and 2006, the number of suits has actually declined eight percent.

· Capping medical malpractice claims would not translate to significantly lower health care costs. Currently, malpractice costs amount to two percent of our $2 trillion total.

· Contrary to tort reformers’ claims, the cost to the system of “defensive medicine” is marginal at best.

· Although tort reformers claim that “junk lawsuits” account for the majority of malpractice claims and clog up the legal system, and have cherry picked misleading study statistics to back up their arguments, a comprehensive Harvard study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that a full 2/3 of malpractice cases involve errors made by doctors. Of that 2/3, 73% resulted in payments to plaintiffs. Of the suits that did not involve an actual doctor error, 72% did not result in payments. As Parikh says, “Those conclusions do not paint the picture of a medical-legal system burdened by ambulance-chasing lawyers and their litigious clients.”

· The cost of malpractice insurance does not drive doctors out of business in rural areas. Rural areas have always had a shortage of doctors relative to highly populated areas, and “with or without tort reform, access to care is likely to stay tight outside of big cities.”

The real culprit for high costs, according to Parikh, are the malpractice insurance companies, who are simply adhering to the tradition of making up for declining investments by increasing their premiums:

Public Citizen…notes "that a historical pattern has been established that insurance rates rise also based on the investment market...Earlier 'crises' (in 1975-6 and 1985-6) similar to today's 'crisis' were due to declining investment fortunes and failed pricing practices of the insurance industry rather than an increase in medical malpractice filings and awards. Then, as now, the insurance industry covered its losses by raising rates dramatically, then blamed the lawyers of innocent patients rightfully seeking compensation for negligence-related injuries." -Salon.com

Most importantly, as Parikh points out, no amount of malpractice reform will help doctors save the lives of more patients. Any humanitarian discussion of health care reform will need to pay a lot more attention to the issue of patient safety.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Camryn Hansen

Health Care Reform - Not Enough Attention to Medical Error Prevention

Mike Ferrara — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:38:27 GMT

According to a report just released by the NJ Department of Health and Senior Services, in 2007, hospital doctors, nurses and other medical workers committed nearly 9,400 "serious medical errors'' that threatened patient health by leading to infections, blood clots, and other unnecessary complications.

The report is the first in the state to compare hospitals with one another, showing exactly where the errors are occurring. Together, New Jersey’s hospitals fared worse than the national average on numbers of post-surgical infections and frequency of wounds re-opening. In other areas, such as surgical equipment being left inside patients after surgery or the wrong blood type being given, New Jersey fared better than other states.

AARP'S Kelmar said matching the national rate in mistakes is not good enough. She noted there were 63 incidents statewide of a foreign object left in the body after surgery -- a rate that is about the national norm.

"The expected rate of occurrence for this incident is zero,'' Kelmar said.

"Disconcerting numbers of preventable medical errors are occurring in our health facilities. Now consumers will know these results,'' said Patricia Kelmar, associate state director for advocacy for AARP-New Jersey, which pushed for the tougher reporting requirements. "Equally important, every hospital can see their own levels of mistakes compared to others, which we hope will encourage them to make the changes necessary to improve patient safety throughout the state." -The StarLedger

While state hospital “report cards” are a great step on the road to reducing medical errors, there is still not enough focus on preventable medical errors in the national health care legislation. All the talk of medical malpractice reform and tort reform has taken attention away from the real issue, which is that more than 100,000 patients die every year from preventable medical errors. Tort reform will do nothing to prevent this, and will only make it more difficult for patients who are needlessly harmed to get the compensation they deserve.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Mike Ferrara

Malpractice Reform will Save the Country Almost Zero, Study Finds

Mike Ferrara — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 17:12:57 GMT

Advocates of medical malpractice reform have been claiming that reform would save the federal government (and taxpayers) between $100 billion and $200 billion a year. These figures have stood at the forefront of the debate on malpractice reform, and have come to be taken for granted as true. Purportedly, saving the country a great deal of money has been one of the tort reformers’ key objectives.

So what do the tort reformers say when they discover that this week, the Congressional Budget Office reported that, contrary to previous claims, malpractice reform is highly unlikely to have a significant impact on government health care spending? That in fact, caps on pain-and-suffering and punitive damages will only lower spending by three tenths of one percent?

Unbelievably, they say Wow, great. That’s really a lot. A whole three tenths of one percent! That’s $11 billion!

Lisa Rickard, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute for Legal Reform, called the analysis "momentous." "Today's CBO analysis should underscore what two-thirds of voters have said: Congress should include meaningful medical liability reform in the healthcare reform bill," she said. –LA Times

Malpractice reformers need to stop spinning the numbers pretending to fight for the noble taxpayer, and be honest about their true motives for reform: they want less corporate accountability and more corporate control over the lives of individual Americans. They want corporations like insurance companies and drug manufacturers to reap endless profits while patients who are truly injured during treatment have no legal recourse. Why do they want this? Because corporations fund their political careers.

Malpractice reform will not save the country a significant amount of money, and will only contribute to the number of people who are killed every year by preventable errors.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Mike Ferrara

Doctor Mistakes – How much do Electronic Systems Help?

Mike Ferrara — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 23:05:57 GMT

President Obama has made electronic medical records central to US health care reform, promising $1.2 billion of assistance to doctors and hospitals in switching from paper to electronic records.

(Can you imagine any other major business succeeding today without an electronic record-keeping system? It's really, really ridiculous that the e-switch hasn't happened yet in most of this country's hospitals and doctors' offices.)

One major reason to switch to electronic records is to help doctors keep track of test results in an effort to avoid medical errors. But study results released this week show that doctors sometimes ignore even electronic warnings concerning abnormal test results. Doctors in the study failed to follow up on almost eight percent of the e-alerts they received about an abnormal x-ray, mammogram, CT scan, MRI, and other imaging tests, even when the results demanded immediate medical attention. The conditions of nearly all of the patients whose results were ignored ended up getting worse as a result.

"Just the fact that you can use technology to deliver a piece of information from the radiologist to a doctor doesn't mean it will be taken care of," said Dr. Hardeep Singh of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, whose study appears in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

"The electronic health record system is a huge improvement from previous paper-based systems, but it is not perfect," Singh said in a telephone interview. -kcrg

Electronic systems will allow doctors to share patients' medical records, communicate information about proven treatments, and send test results reminders. Many Veterans Affairs medical centers (one of which was the subject of the study) have been using the systems for nearly a decade.

If neglecting to follow up on eight percent of abnormal test results is a "huge improvement" over the status quo, just how bad is the status quo?

If you have had an experience with an ignored abnormal test result or any other medical mistake, we want to hear the truth from you! Please post your story.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Mike Ferrara