Posted on 03/26/2004 6:08:10 PM PST by freedomcrusader
Yesterday, Pennsylvania's medical malpractice crisis hit home. My wife is due with our second child in May. She had a prenatal visit with her OB yesterday.
Her OB is leaving the state after April 30. This doctor (a woman) has been with five different insurance companies, all of whom have stopped doing business in PA. The remaining insurance companies all want something like $30K up front plus $90K per year.
She's been in practice for 30 years, and now she is in danger of foreclosure on her house, late on IRS payments, pulling $100K out of her retirement (the 20% penalty alone is going to be killer), and forced to sell her practice at approximately 30% of its value.
We're left with the choice of having my wife induced in late April (unless she would go into labor early), or switching OBs. We've decided the latter, but get this: it is common practice, I am told, for the OB that delivers to get the single payment for the whole pregnancy, from the first prenatal visit to delivery and postnatal checkup. So by leaving this doctor, she gets nothing for all the prenatal care she's provided us to date.
She's looking at joining a practice in rural Maine.
Fast Eddie is the worst thing to happen to this state since Milton J. Shapp, and this state will rot from the inside like a shiny tooth until the trial lawyers' syndicate is broken....which in itself might take a crisis involving multiple deaths.
Not a bad suggestion, but it ought to hold for lawyers, too. Bad actors in each profession can cause a lot of damage.
Rheumatologist's fee for 20 minutes: $168.00
I am here for a few weeks in Manila, Philippines. My ear was very itchy. I decided to go to the most reputable hospital in the country, "The Asian Hospital".
The otorhinologist's office was tastefully decorated and I was processed very quickly. The staff was pleasant and they entered all the information into the computer, even taking a digital photo of me for future reference. After a few minutes, I went in to the specialist. He quickly looked me over, did some simple tests with a tuning fork, found a small cyst in one ear that is harmless but could be removed, and gave me my options. He also wrote me a prescription by pointing and clicking in the computer - the prescription slip printed out with laser-sharp text (no indecipherable scribbles); and HAD MY PHOTO on it so the pharmacy can be sure of who is ordering the drugs.
TOTAL COST: $11.00 for visit.
Medicine in the USA is doomed unless we get rid of the scammers known as trial lawyers.
Yes, but there's also the modern mentality out there of 'something went wrong but someone else must pay' in addition to 'my decision was the wrong one but someone else must pay'.
I agree that the crummy docs should be hung high, but there are people out there who sue for something 'the doctor should have forseen and prevented' when it reality it falls under the category of sh*t happens. Or like patients who sign for an amniocentesis knowing the risks of miscarriage, suffer a miscarriage, then sue the doc.
Frivolous lawsuits are the second side of this coin, in my opinion.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with the comment about lawyer self-policing. They talk a good game, but...
Some states have web-based bar overseer sites open to the public--or at least MA does. One of its better governmental moves. It takes a LOT for a lawyer to get the boot, and its not predictable whether a given act will actually cause it. Check out some discipline cases at this URL:
http://www.mass.gov/obcbbo/default.htm
Most guys get off easy -- say six month to a year suspension before they're back in business for behavior that would get a doctor ruined, both monetarily and professionally.
I'd say that lawyer malpractice rates aren't skyrocketing because malpractice is so expensive and difficult to prove. It used to be that way for doctors, too.
Sounds like the lawyer's wet dream of what tort reform ought to be. Wish it worked that way for the rest of us.
There might be 5% bad doctors, that's probably minimal in any profession. However, they've got nothing to do with the cerebral palsy racket and other legal scams.
What an outrage! In PA, the average doc has to pay an amount usually equal to their malpractice insurance premium into the CAT fund (short for catastrophic loss fund). So, most docs are paying 5 figures for med mal, and another 5 figures into the CAT fund. In the meantime, lawyers pay less per year into an equivalent fund than doctors pay for their medical license.
So when are doctors going to start demanding that the 5% of their profession who suck rocks be stripped of their licenses?
That's such a load, I've been named in 3 suits over 21 years of practice and all have been dismissed. The problem is that I had to get an attorney, file depositions, get expert witnesses and waste my time that could have been used to living my life and playing with my 4 kids.
Basically the way it works is that a bad outcome = treasure hunt for family members and lawyers. All the docs on the chart are named and either settle or get dismissed. Very rarely do you go to trial. After my third dismissal my attorney wanted a little thank you.... I said" F@#k you very much, a-hole." He could have had my case thrown out at the beginning but milked his hourly billing, document fees, consultants and travel expenses to basically rip off my malpractice insurance carrier. Was pushing for mediation which is really a rip off, cause another lawyer gets to sit down and eat out of the malpractice insurers trough.
For any docs reading this just remember the lawyer on your side is part of the problem as well as your hired bitch.
Yeah, they make them judges.
I noticed you don't yet have a tagline.
So, what are you waiting for?
I didn't even know he left. He was the primary care doctor for both my wife and I and we both received letters in the mail from our insurance company, telling us that our doctor left the network and they have assigned us new primary care doctors.
Unfortunately, they assigned me a doctor 100 miles away and my wife a doctor 150 miles away! (A query on their web site showed more than 50 doctors within 15 miles of our house.)
I called them to complain about it, and their response was "well, you can change it to the doctor you want". But why did you make an insane choice to start with!?!
She's trying to sell her practice to a group of 5 OBs on the floor above hers (hospital-based office space). She doesn't have a sale yet.
Best of luck on your new child. I will hope very hard that things turn out for the best.
An anecdote: My friend got his vacation house stolen from him by a slick lawyer on Long Island NY. Said lawyer ripped off others too, blew all the money gambling and partying. Two years later the NY Bar Association gave my friend the entire value of the house, $150,000. This bar association has a fund to straighten out the misdeeds of crooked NY lawyers
That's absolute bullsh!t, rogueleader.
The only reason that lawyer's malpractice rates are not skyrocketing is because we live in a country where the legislative process and the judicial process is of the lawyers, by the lawyers, for the lawyers.
For the first time in my medical practice, I was recently sued.
The case involves a patient seen in the Emergency Room at night, while I was at home with my family, for a lacerated finger that ended up having a lacerated tendon that was missed by the E.R. doctor and ultimately picked up by an orthopaedic surgeon.
My only involvement in the case was that the E.R. ordered an X-Ray that I, the hospital radiologist, read the next morning. The X-Ray showed no fracture and tendons can not be seen by X-Rays so no radiological diagnosis could be offered in regards to tendon laceration.
Since my name was on a report on the medical record, the lawyer sued my wife, our community property and me.
State law in Washington State requires that a lawyer obtain an opinion from a medical professional prior to filing a lawsuit to determine if it has merit. When my malpractice carrier's attorney called this lawyer to point out that tendons cannot be seen on X-Rays, this lawyer admitted that he had never bothered to ask an M.D. or another attorney experienced in medical malpractice if tendons can be seen on X-Rays.
The slimy S.O.B. has not even performed a simple Google Search on "tendons, seen on X-Rays".
Yet, the lawyer refuses to drop the cases.
The incompetent and lazy S.O.B. has asked my attorney for two weeks to find out if tendons can be seen on X-Rays.
One of my patients is the local judge and, since he would have to disqualify himself in any case regarding me, I asked if I may "pick his legal brain" when he came to see me for a procedure.
I asked him what could be done about such a blatant case of legal malpractice and the reply was, "Not much. The Legislature needs to address the issue."
Can I sue the lawyer for malpractice?
Yes, you can sue anybody but Washington State won't allow punative damages against a lawyer so you only get damages for actual monetary loss. Those are the legal fees you incurred in defending yourself and it may cost you more to sue him.
In addition, he could claim that, if he did not sue everybody in sight, his client could sue him for legal malpractice so that it was his duty to sue me.
Therefore, his rights as a lawyer not to get sued for any conceivable reason trump my rights as a physician not to get sued for a totally frivolous reason.
This lazy and incompetent scumbag of a lawyer has utterly failed to excercise the due diligenge required by Washington State law, he has caused my wife and me unecessary stress in our lives, he has cost my malpractice carrier thousands of dollars in legal fees, he has forced me to answer "Yes" to the question "Have you ever been sued for malpractice?" in any insurance company provider form I ever fill out in the future and there are not any practical legal steps I can take against this slimy worm.
The lawyer's malpractice rates are not skyrocketing for the simple reason that nothing short of raping a person he sues while videotaping it and having the videotape fall into the possession of the Police qualifies as legal malpractice in this country.
Even in such a case, the lawyer-controlled Legislatures might fight a god reason why the persons he sues are in need of a good raping.
If you disagree with me, rogueleader, then please advise me as to how I can extract the maximum degree of pain and suffering from this incompetent and unethical lawyer for what he has done to me.
And how many TV ads do you see urging people to sue their lawyers? (voiceover) "Do you have [insert name of popular malady/illness/condition here]? It may be the fault of your trial lawyer. We'll help you sue him. Just call the medical offices of X, Y, and Z." (note, [insert state here] does not recognize specialties of legal practice).
I won't tar all lawyers with a broad brush. Some of our best friends are lawyers, LOL, and we also have dear family members who are lawyers, and they are deserving of our respect.
Lawsuit(s) ? I guess you have had it worse than I have. (Knock on wood.)
I attended a mammography conference last week. Mammography is a radiology specialty that is being dropped like a King Cobra all across the country.
The medical literature documents that 15% of all cancers can be missed on mammography. With 20/20 hindsight, 70% of the previous year's mammograms can show that most subtle change that a blood-sucking lawyer can use to say, "Aha! He should have seen it last year!"
As a result, in a two county area with over a dozen radiologists, I am only one of three radiologists who still takes a risk reading mammograms.
As they said at the mammography conference, we take the risk because somebody should for the good of the community.
As for the lawyers, the lecturer giving the talk on the malpractice risk said, "Ninety seven percent of the lawyers give the other three percent a bad name."
Funny, isn't it. You've been sued. I've been sued. And for what? For providing medical care to America and so that legal vultures can attempt to making a living out of trying to drive us out of medicine. How many others on FreeRepublic have been sued?
This lawsuit has taught me one thing. As soon as I have enough money to retire, I'm retiring from medicine and not one day later.
If someone does something about these out-of-control legal cockroaches, I may practice medicine until the day I die.
You realize that could feed a family of four in the Phillipines for something like three months?
Could you please explain how trial lawyers are responsible for doctor's indecipherable scribbles?
Finally, wouldn't you admit that your wife's muscle and joint pains sound like a more serious problem than "itchy ear?"
Cough, cough. B-b-b-b-bullshit. If the doctor did nothing wrong, the insurance carrier has the economic incentive to fight to their last drop of blood. If they decided to settle, they saw a risk of losing.
It's a lot easier to get someone to sign off on a settlement if you let them save a little face.
However, I'm so damn glad that a couple hundred million of them choose to do so. The easter, the better.
Satire on.
What a great idea. After all, European medical care is vastly superior to America's. Nobody ever gets the wrong leg chopped off in Europe. Nobody gets a pair of tweezers sewn up inside them in Europe. Nobody is dropped off of an operating table in Europe.
Yeah, loser pays. So when the English medical system sends somebody home with a broken arm set in a dinner napkin (yes this really happened, and only a few weeks ago), the poor chap will have no legal recourse available because LOSER PAYS. What a fine plan.
Satire off.
Doctors make lots of money in America because we have the free market system, and thank God for that. To make the system work, though, you've got to have some kind of legal recourse where people can sue doctors who made really bad errors. One study found that 100,000 Americans are killed every year because of medical errors. The question is: how do we reduce the number of errors? It's not: how do we get people to stop whining about egregiously bad medical care they've received despite paying high health insurance premiums?
A lot is broken in the health care system in the US, and lot of that is attributable to HMOs and other problems. Frivolous lawsuits contribute to the problem. Another big contributor is the high number of medical errors that occur in the US every year. As I said before, the huge majority of these errors are caused by a tiny number of doctors. For stupid political reasons, these typhoid mary doctors are not kicked out of the system. Kick them out and we will all be better off.
And yes, nail the bad lawyers to the wall, too.
I dare you to ask her (1) how many doctors she knows of who should not be practicing doctors, and (2) whether she ever reported any of them to the state licensing board.
It's a shame when good doctors are financially squeezed, but ultimately, all they have to do is start reporting the bad doctors and get them kicked out of the profession.
But you don't report him to the medical board. Why not? I don't know. Maybe code of the brotherhood or something.
Whoa, there, rogueleader. Stop the music. Stop the music!
How is it that you know or don't know what I report to the medical board?
You don't.
I am the Chairman of my hospital's Credentials Committee. If there there is one malpractice case in a doctor's file that sends up a red flag, that doctor is not awarded privileges at my hospital.
One doctor in our town was suspected by another doctor of being too free with prescribing controlled meds and that other doctor in town reported that to my Committee and brought the case files to support his suspicions. The suspected doctor had delivered both of my children and was a social friend but that doctor was reported to the Stare Credentialing Board by my Committee. That doctor is no longer practicing in this town or in this State. After that doctor leaves my Hospital, I have no power over that individual.
So, rogueleader, don't presume to tell this Forum what I do or do not do. You do not know me and you have no idea what I do or do not do.
Report these creeps and maybe you hang yourself by violating the doctor's code of silence or something. Meanwhile people are getting hurt for no good reason.
My Committee reported that individual to the State and the State took whatever action it saw fit. No bombs have yet been planted in my car. What "Code of Silence" do you believe exists in medicine?
I am down with you all the way on nailing bad lawyers to the wall. What separates us is that you don't seem to want the same thing for bad doctors.
Again, rogueleader, where do you get off making such a holier-than-thou statement?
Show me where I have said such a thing. Show me.
If I have reported the physician who delivered my own children to the State Licensing Board, is that not good enough for you?
Get them kicked out of the profession. Pretty soon, the case load for malpractice lawyers will dry up. This will lead to less malpractice lawyers and fewer frivolous lawsuits.
Ummmmm.........The lawyer that sued me is not a malpractice lawyer. He is a local yokel in the next County who thought there was money in filing a lawsuit against me when it has no merit whatsoever.
As long as there is money to be made, lawyers will sue anybody they believe they can make a buck out of.
First, know the system. The lawyer your medical malpractice insurance carrier hires for you is your lawyer, but he is paid by the insurance carrier. He might have conflicting loyalties. You have to be aware of this to protect yourself.
My insurance carrier's lawyer has absolutely no interest in filing a counter-suit. There is no money in it as you can't get punitive damages out of a crooked lawyer in Washington State. Also when you think about it, lawyers who file frivolous lawsuits are his rainmakers. His advice was to consider frivolous lawsuits "as the price of practicing medicine in America".
I did contact my own lawyer and the advice was that the damages I could collect would be probably less than the lawyer's fees I would have to pay as no punative damages are allowed against crooked lawyers in Washington State.
Many of these defense lawyers will hardly ever meet with their real client, the doctor.
My insurance carrier's lawyer took an entire day to travel to come and meet with me....All billable hours charged to my malpractice insurance company. Ka-Ching!
Sixth, you can report a bad lawyer to the state bar. As this is a drastic step, you will want to talk to your existing lawyers about it first. You don't want to adversely affect your trial strategy. You want to win at trial.
That is what my patient, the local judge, advised me to do.......After the case is dismissed with prejudice by the Court.
The judge's prediction was that the lawyer would, at the very worst, get off with a slap on the wrist. However, "if enough complaints are filed against him, eventually he will suffer consequences".
After this is over, that is exactly what I plan to do: File a complaint against the lawyer's license with the State of Washington with a "Copy to" sent to whichever State legislator is championing tort reform.
The lawyer will only get a slap on the wrist, if that, but at least I can return the favor of making his life miserable, force him to take the time to answer the charges, get a complaint into his State licensing file and hopeful get him to think twice before pulling this cr@p on another physician without doing his homework.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.