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Youngsters Make Merry at Evanston Country Club Christmas Party
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The post Youngsters Make Merry at Evanston Country Club Christmas Party
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5 hours ago
but drdan, if you were to limit malpractice suits, what would prevent you from pulling granny's plug when Obama and his death panels orders you to?
ReplyDeleteSeriously, I liked the posting and am sympathetic to the doctors plight. I like to watch medical mysteries with its missed diagnoses and years of suffering to find out at the end the malady was caused by walking barefoot in a jungle in the Amazon contracting a 1 in a 100,000,000 case. It makes me glad I ain't a doctor, so I sure as hell understand defensive medicine, not least because doctors can be wrong.
But your article lacked specifics as to what you think should be done (as opposed to why it should be done), such as what form you think malpractice tort reform should take. I see nothing wrong with capping non medical damages to under a million, say 750. But really, I don't have a clue. If you would be so kind as to lay out the drdan tort reform act (if you got the time)
charo
I'm not so much in favor of capping damages per se, since there are plenty of cases where the harm sustained was egregious, and I think caps are arbitrary.
ReplyDeleteI would support a system, similar to how complaints to the board of licensure in medicine are handled, under which malpractice lawsuits are first reviewed by an appointed, impartial panel of medical experts. Suits judged to be without merit would be dismissed without trial.
Dan, AIUI, this would not pass Constitutional due process muster. You can't have an unelected, unaccountable panel of peers of the accused determining if a suit can even be considered by a court. That's just wrong.
ReplyDeletegj, of course you can, if prior to receiving treatment patients have to sign waivers agreeing to such a kind of arbitration. I am not saying this is a good thing, just that it can pass.
ReplyDeletecharo
I'm no legal scholar, so I could very well be proposing something that wouldn't pass legal muster. But I would prefer to find some way of allowing impartial medical personnel weigh in on the results of a malpractice case than an arbitrary cap of damages.
ReplyDeleteThere are alternatives to caps. For example, we could limit contingency fees by law to, ohh, 3%. We could have loser's attorney pays winner's costs. There are any number of things we could do; I believe most attorneys know when the case is not serious. But attorneys can win by simply being class A pests and reminding those with something to lose that going before a jury with a sob story is quite the gamble. There must be a penalty for attorneys.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I think we need single payer legal protection. Put all attorneys on salary, let the government set rates, standards, and limits on what can be done for any single case, especially those cases that are kept on life support in the faint hope of a settlement, and Bob's your uncle. We'll bend the legal cost curve down, and save the Federal Government squillions!