Slashdot Mirror
'They Can Sue, But They Can't Hide'
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times (free reg's yada, yada) has this article about Texas doctors running an online blacklist of patients who have sued. The searchable database is at doctorsknow.us. Nice to know that you can get blacklisted for suing the doctor that caused massive brain damage to your kid (and winning)." To add a plaintiff to the database, membership was not always required.
Reminds me of the Seinfeld episode called "The Package," when Elaine keeps getting the shaft at the doctor's office after being labeled as "difficult."
Imagine how you'll be treated when your chart has you labeled as "malpractice lawsuit plaintiff." The doctor won't even come into the room.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Create a free public online database of doctors who have been sued and the reasons why. I know there are dbs out there with info on docs, but it's generally very limited, I assume for fear of lawsuit :-)
I wonder what they use to uniquely identify patients? I mean, going by name isn't very useful, unless you know that previous addresses of your new patients.
/me is too lazy to try to sign up for free trial.
Most charts include your social security number, is it legal for them to use this, or do they have another way?
The expert whose decision in a lawsuit is most important is a doctor.
For several thousands of lawsuits, less than 10 were won by the patienst.
People with sponges, scissors, pieces of bandaid left in their bodies during a surgery lost. People whose relatives died because the doctor administered a drug that works opposite to what was obviously required, lost. Doctors found drunk on duty were claimed innocent.
Be happy that you can win at all.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
For programs that do not work.
I think I should be able to sue the provider of any software package for any economic harm caused by it.
Geez, I could sue every Linux Developer, every Windows developer, and I could probably get a few hundred bucks out of each.
Oh, suddenly this seems unfair?
Maybe Doctors are just looking for some balance in litigation?
This is my sig.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The Doctors records of misconduct and related board actions are private. Doctors want this info on others, but they do not want others to have the same level of detail on them.
I think it is about time somethign like this happened. Alot of doctors are going without malpractice insurance to save money and lower costs to the patient. Something like this will help them achive this goal.
I wouldn't want to have a law suite happy client either. In all reality the people that sue thier doctors (or anynone for that matter) are usually looking for a cashcow. If they only were allowed to recover expenses incured because of the malpractrice/whatever then there would be alot less law suites going on.
Geting an extra 5 mil becuase something went wrong and they lost a patient or an arm or somethign doesn't really help anyone. It serves no purpose other than to enrich the plantif and cause the prices of medical proceedures to skyrocket. People think there is money availible and they want it.
Hear, hear! If you want to point a finger, point it towards ambulance chasers. They cause insurance rates to skyrocket, followed directly by the cost of healthcare, and you end up with such defense reactions. Sure it's not perfect, because it's the first time someone thought of it; but how good were the spam filters when they first appeared?
I for one am for it. Flame away!
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
...to rising health care costs, which result from the overabundance of law suits. Only the seriously injured people sue. I can certainly feel for the legitimately injured being put on this list, but if their case had merit, it shouldn't make good doctors afraid to deal with them.
i have heard of cases where ob/gyns would not accept patients that were lawyers that has pursued malpractice actions. while it was interesting to hear women lawyers bitch about having to leave their county to find a doctor, it was *more* interesting to find out how many people felt no sorrow for them.
eric
I totally understand how frustrating it must be to have someone screw up like that (my own grandmother got a terrible knee infection after a nurse screwed up and put her post op knee in a whirlpool). These types of cases *should* be taken to court or some sort of resolution sought.
But having known a doctor in my family, there are tons of people out there looking to start trouble, patients who try to scam the doc's for painkillers and all sorts of scary stuff you wouldn't believe. There are 10 bad patients for every 1 bad doctor. The doc I know has to reject patients all the time because they seem to be the type of person who is looking for any pretense under which to sue.
The question I'd pose to everyone lambasting this blacklist is that if you were a business person and in the course of doing business you exposed yourself to significant risk of liability and you know one of your customers was just looking for a reason to sue you... would you do business with them?
Insurance rates do not skyrocket from lawsuits. There has not been a significant rise in number of suits or in total rewards.
Why then, do premiums rise so dramatically? The answer is simply because insurance companies are required to keep a certain percentage of their total coverages as a reserve. Certain amounts of this has to be in cash, but a good percentage can be in a stock or other market portfolio. That's right: a lot of this legally mandated reserve is in stocks. Guess what happens when the stock market crashes? That reserve evaporates. Can anyone remember anything like that happening recently?
So what happens when 80% of your reserve disappears? You have to get the money somehow, it's required. Legally. So what else can you put into the reserve, if not your now worthless stock portfolio? Cash. How do you get cash? Premiums. Premiums went up beceause insurance companies stock portfolios plumetted and they needed the cash to fill their reserve.
I love Slashdot.
Damn Government, trying to censor information that wants to be free.
Damn doctors, thinking up new ways to share information.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
The list would be more aceptable if both sides faced a limit on the number of entries. Any doctor submitting too many blacklist candidates is probably incompetent -- one has to wonder why they are being sued so often. And any patient getting too many blacklist submissions is probably a litigious scammer.
If both sides faced consequences for participating on the blacklist, both sides would be more careful about what they do.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
While I agree that doctors should have a way to protect themselves from patients who have a chronic case of filing malpractice suits, I wish that they had come up with a different answer. Why don't doctors put some money into lobbying for a loser pays legal system?
My blog
Doctors aren't only sued for death. They're sued for a variety of reasons, some of which are silly, pointless, or both.
Unless you're going to only allow malpractice suits when death is the end result, in which case we might find some common ground. But that's not what you were saying. You were just being a moron.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
That sound more plausible than the rest of the explanations. I know that HMOs & insurance companies have caused the cost of medical care to rise while depressing the incomes of doctors. In many specialties, the only doctors around are the ones that both entered decades ago and are also quite dedicated. And there are more patients than they can handle, so they are turning away all new patients.
I know that doctors offices used to get by with one receptionist and one nurse, but now also need at least one specialist in insurance forms.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Education = YES
Training = YES,
Complaints against them = NO
Actions taken against them by their Licensing board = NO.
It it helps the doctor the public has access, but if it could hurt the doctor the public doesn't.
When I was practicing in the deep south, the malpractice problem seemed a lot worse.
Poorly educated patients would sue and sue... and eventually they would find some poorly educated jury to give them a lot of money.
Poorer people also pull the "sue card" in order to pressure the physician into signing the disability paperwork. Then the money just comes from everybody instead of the doctor's insurance company.
Davak
This database is as usefull to the doctors as it is to the patients. Think about it your looking for a doctor to see you go online search by doctor,specialty and sort by number of occurences in descending order. If your doctor shows up near the top great, if hes near the bottom time to ask a friend for a refferal.
IANAD, but I am an EMT, so I do have a little insight into the protection that those in the medical field need against potential lawsuits. First off, people expect perfection from doctors in even the most impossible instances. Despite what George Clooney and "ER" would have you believe, you do not always save the patient (I won't even get into how many thorachotomies they perform on that show). However, people do not understand the concept of "Not being able to do something". Doctors are human, not Gods. There are many lawsuits that are brought against physicians that are frivalous in most respects, but juries find infavor of the plantiff. There are many cases of pregnant women who come into ER's because they are 3 months premature in labor. The woman is a crack abuser and she's drunk at the time of labor, and she's had no pre-natal care. When the baby is born with birth defects, do you think the woman or juries care about any of this when making multi million dollar rulings in favor of the mother? The answer is no. It's things like this that make malpractice insurance so high for specialities like OB/GYN that there is now a national shortage of OB's who are willing to practice with the system we have. Kings County hospital recently had their cardiac surgery unit suspended because they had a 10% mortality rate. I recently interviewed there for med school and asked about this, and I was told that it's because they didn't selectively choose their patients. Most hospitals around the country will not treat heart patients who do not have a good chance of surviving because it will lead to lower hospital ratings. King's County made a choice and had a unit suspended for it because they tried to give people a chance. So I don't think that physicians are totally out of line when they try to take every precaution they can so that they might be able to continue practicing.
Lets look at some statistics... www.medical-malpractice-lawyers-attorneys.com The two statistics that caught my eye were:
1. From 1996 through 1999, Florida hospitals reported 19,885 incidents but only 3,177 medical malpractice claims. In other words, for every 6 medical errors only 1 claim is filed.
2. Malpractice insurance costs amount to only 3.2 percent of the average physician's revenues according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC)
or this link: Citizen.org:
"10.6 percent of the state's doctors have paid two or more malpractice awards to patientsThese repeat offender doctors are responsible for 84 percent of all payments. Even more surprising, only 4.7 percent of Pennsylvania 's doctors (1,838), each of whom has paid three or more malpractice claims, are responsible for 51.4 percent of all payments. "
Frivolis lawsuits really aren't that much of a problem. I am much more concerned about the increasing privitazation and high price of Prescription drugs in this country.
This is the first reference I've seen to a database for physician use about patients. However, you should know that physicians have long had a much more certain guide to difficult patients - namely, word-of-mouth from each other, and from the chart that follows every patient wherever they go.
I don't see an ethical problem for physicians who use it; the Hippocratic oath does not obligate physicians to serve every person who comes to them. Many hospitals reserve the right to refuse service under any of a number of conditions.
However, there are strict guidelines (Privacy Act of 1974 and HIPAA) for the use of databases in health care practice. Among the provisions is the right of patients to view their data and request revisions when appropriate. I looked at the DoctorsKnow.us website, and there doesn't seem to be a provision for a patient to look himself or herself up, see their information, and dispute/correct it. As a private company, they don't need to be HIPAA compliant, but this is a bad precedent.
And Dr Phil will truthfully answer that he was sued for malpractice because he turned up to work drunk?
The danger here is that doctors who got sued quite legitimately will use this to get revenge on anyone who sued them.
What next? A list of anyone who brought a complaint against a doctor?
So next time you go to a doctor you wont know whether he is a good doctor, or only practicing because his patients are too scared to lodge a complaint against him for fear of not being able to get treatment in future.
I am Monkey, the Great Sage, equal of heaven!
Physicians make few decisions these days. The INSURACE COMPANIES tell the doctors what drugs the can use and how many patients to see in a day....
I do not agree with your theory at all but I have no experience with a pure HMO. I've been seeing the same doctor with 4 different insurance companies over the years. I can not see how each insurance company he accepts are all controlling him at the same time. I get the same drugs and the same treatments regardless of what insurance company I've had. Yeah, the free samples change from time to time but that's it. In fact, I'd be willing to bet the only two people in the office that even know what insurance I have are myself and the receptionist who photocopied my card.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
I am speaking as someone involved in the medical profession in australia, I am not a doctor. All of you idiots screaming that this is a bad idea haven't bothered to understand WHY this has come about. In australia and i suspect the rest of the world the cost of health care is being driven through the roof by insurance costs, becuase of litigation. Nothing wrong with a doctor being taken for malpractise, but no other profession in the world has to put up with this treats FOR 20 YEARS AFTER. the facts are, unless something is done to cork the costs of insurance for medical care, we won't have a health system. doctors don't have to work, you can't force them to put their homes etc at risk from ligtagous pricks as listed.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Cell phone companies also have a database that contains customers that have broken their contracts...
The "credit check" that they look for is gives LOTS more value to breaking a cell phone contract / returning a phone within the 14 day trial than having declared bankruptcy within the past 6 months....
The major problem is that in Texas, you can't see the Doctor's record. Period. I thought that was a Federal thing, but I guess not.
What the insurance co's say is that:
People go for Jackpot Justice. Tell it to my dead mother, killed when the Doctor was fired, refused to let the new doctor into the nursing home, and withdrew all medications. Did we sue? No. Somehow a autopsy was "mistakenly" cancelled by the attending doctor, the same one that was fired.
The huge awards given drive up policy costs: False, the stock market has more to do with it, plus the 4% of doctors that are sued 80% of the time. Get rid of that 4%. Don't let them practice.
Average award for malpractice? Don't know. Many are settled out of court and the award sealed.
So, given that, I can sympatize with high policy costs, but I think the real problem in Texas is that the insurance industry owns the state government lock, stock, and greedy out-thrust hand. For example, on a 100,000 home, the homeowner's insurance rate is 2,900.00 a year. And it doesn't cover water damage for the most part. A law was passed when Dubbya was Gov. requiring insurance to pay for damage to homes caused by foundation problems. They only pay if a water or sewer line breaks, not for any other reason. Oh, yeah, if you have ropes of mold growing due to a water leak, fix it yourself. Insurance pays nothing.
I loved it when the neighbor ran into my garage door and knocked it down. My homeowers wouln't pay, his car insurance said "File on your homeowner's". I eventually paid for it myself.
So when someone says that it's all the suits that cause rates to go up, I laugh. It's not.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Do a public records search to see if your doctor has been sued for malpractice before. If he has ever been sued, just fire him. You don't want the risk... Isn't that what they are saying to us?
I've lived with lawyers, and they were the most pedanticaly anal assholes I've ever had the mispleasure of sharing a house with. Sure enough, when the flats dissolved, they were writing letters and making demands and generally pissing everyone outside of their clique off (obviously I was one of those on the receiving end). They don't seem to understand that notion of "give and take" that lets people get along smoothly. I can only imagine what landlords have to go through when things get difficult. Give me a flat with laid-back pot-smoking geeks anyday. /generalizing, but that's my experience anyway...
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Many doctors are afraid of being sued (or worse, costing a life), and hence always order every possible test on the off chance that patient XYZ has the only north american occurance of obscure disease LMNOP. Sure, a million dollar work up can more easily spot the odd stuff, but does every patient REALLY need a million dollars worth of tests when presenting with a cold?
how bout we regulate the malpractice insurance premiums instead? Though I suppose that won't work either.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
I don;t want cold coffee because people are stupid enough to spill it on their nads. Sorry, i still feel no sympathy.
My father is a well respected doctor in my hometown. He's on the board of the Foundation For Othrodonic Research, which is the premier organization for advances in orthodontics.
.agrippa.
My father pays more in medical malpractice insurance than I made last year. He gets sued regularily by people who don't understand basic principals of taking care of their braces. For instance, one of his younger patients decided chowing down on ice cubes was a prudent thing to do. He promptly ripped off one of his braces, which then cut into his lip. His mother sued my father for malpractice.
Another case my father faced was when a teen didn't want his braces and manually removed them from his teeth. The smart lad stripped off most of the enamel on his teeth as well. My father was sued because the teen lied to his parents and only later in court was it proved my father wasn't at fault.
It's bogus cases like that drive up malpractice costs. These doctors aren't being greedy. They are trying to save their practices. It's almost no different than blacklisting spammers.
Some patients abuse the system, too. They use a shotgun approach and attempt to sue and sue and sue. By using lawyers that only collect fees for winning, these patients hurt the doctor and the lawyer side of "medicine."
My experience as an attorney with personal injury cases has been that clients have no money. If they are severely injured or disabled, they don't have the cash available to pay for legal representation. So many people live paycheck to paycheck that if they get hurt in a car accident or by medical negligence that they are facing repos on cars, foreclosure on the McMansion, etc. I frequently have clients take less money than their case is worth because they need it so badly.
In addition, I do not want shitty cases. I do an investigation of every case that I take, because I cannot afford to spend the money on a case that may earn me bupkus. It costs approximately $15,000-$25,000 where I work to take a case through trial to verdict. I will take cases where my potential fee is less than that if I know that the case will settle (most do), but if it is a dog, I want nothing to do with it. I mentioned elsewhere that I do not do med mal cases. On the other hand, I know med mal guys who do plaintiffs work, and they operate on the same basis -- they do not want shit cases.
In addition, the area I live in has swallowed the insurance companies' propaganda hook, line, and sinker. The area is very GOP and very hardcore. I often joke that the juries, when deliberating about damages in a PI case, mention their Uncle Merle who "had 'is arm ripped off in a combine, and that plaintiff guy with the cervical disk problems don't look near as bad as Merle did after he done drug the tractor back to the barn with one arm before walking 8 miles to the hospital."
Does this type of system leave a foul taste in my mouth? Hell, yeah. The guys that are making money off of this are almost as bad as those habitual plantiffs.
However, I say this with the bias that I have never been sued by one of these rabid money grabbers.
Attorneys who make money representing plaintiffs are no more or less morally objectionable than doctors who make money off the sick and then sue the bejeezus out of the estates of people who died while under their care for cancer. I know a couple of guys whose practice consists of collecting debts for a medical practice called "Cancer Care Associates". It's really heartwarming work. At least the plaintiffs bar has to be successful to get paid. The doctors don't have to be successful.
Yeah, the system is screwed--on both sides of the equation.
I don't buy it. The system works great in the county where I live. The problem with Pennsylvania is largely confined to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Elsewhere, it's just a money grab by doctors and insurers. The thing that is really funny to me is how many "regular" people are bitching about the lawyers, mouthing the insurance company party line, and not realizing that they are screwing themselves by throwing away the right to sue. They honestly think that it will make health care more affordable, but they are completely wrong. It'll just make insurance companies billions of more dollars while leaving vicitims of medical negligence with no recourse.
Lots of petrified grits
You think third degree burns requiring skin grafts take only 8 days to heal? I bet we could find enough people around here to scrape together $400,000 if you allow us to pour scalding hot coffee into your lap and cause third degree burns to your genitals. Still interested? I didn't think so.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Buy a list of names of state residents and add all of them to the database, therefore rendering it useless. Or better yet, go the AMA and get a list of all doctors, and add them. Seriously, what provisions does this thing have for separating malicious data from facts? Can I go ahead and add my neighbors when they piss me off?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Infections are a fact of life. Even with the best sterilization procedures hospitals are still hotbeds of infection, especially antibiotic resistant strains. The real question is where the doctors actually incompetent, or was it just bad luck?
Let's presume for a second it actually was the fault of the doctors. Presumably, he was the patient of one or two doctors in a large hospital. He sues and gets a couple million. Now he is a couple million richer (and his lawyer several million richer), but he doesn't have his legs back. Now the hospital is even more stretched for cash. The hospital can afford fewer doctors and nurses, can pay the competent doctors it has less (encouraging them to seek employment in private clinics) and their malpractice insurance costs sky-rocket to even higher. Now the hospital and it's patients are even worse off then before and someone else is going to lose his legs, or his arm or his life. Lot of good that lawsuit did, it made one double amputee moderatly wealthy, got some sleazy contingency lawyer a shiny new boat, cost some doctors who may or may not even be at fault their license, and cause more pain and suffering to the patients of the hospital. When did getting a lot of money become justice?
If you owned a place would you rent to a lawyer? I surely would not.
Nope. I had one dirtbag lawyer as a tenant who caused me a bunch of trouble, screwed me out of a month's rent, and wouldn't vacate (I had sold the building and that was one of the conditions of the sale, since the buyers could tell just from talking to him what a pain in the ass he would be) until I paid him off. Kept quoting me 'laws' that either didn't exist or whose provisions he misstated. Not that I believed his lies, but he was clearly prepared to take them to court and lose just to delay the sale. He was worse than the tenants I found out were dealing drugs from my building (and there's long story of heartache in that incident). No more lawyers.
I have several lawyers for clients. The personal injury ones are all just freaking scumbags. Their main complaint that I hear over and over is that the people who get hurt and they sue on behalf of do not go to the doctor often enough, or as often as the lawyer tells them to.
Does that just not make you want to scream? I go to the doctor when I hurt or when I have a difficulty that warrants it. If I dont WANT to go to the doctor, my complaint is probably not bad enough to warrant chasing down some insurance company over.
In addition, its just all about the deep pockets. Personal Injury attorneys I have come in contact with regularly screen and only take cases where the defendant has a large insurance policy they can rape.
Chuck
I remember a guy at work who came to work saying how he had got a flu, but self-perscribed some antibiotics and knocked it out quick.
If the sickness responded quickly to antibiotics, then it wasn't the flu. Most likely a strep or mild staph infection of the throat, sinuses, upper respiratory... which *do* usually get "knocked out quick"... usually by the first day's worth of the antibiotics. The bad problem here is that people quit taking the antibiotics after maybe two or three days because they think they are cured, but there are still some bacteria left behind that will get stronger and more resistant. You need to take the full course of antibiotics to hammer down those, even if you must take them for a full week after you feel totally well, and not save the rest of the pills for the next time you feel sick.
I know quite a few doctors. They do well, but they should after what they have to go through in school and residency. They don't do that well. Your average GP is not driving a $100,000 car and owning a private Island. Hell, I doubt many brain surgeons are doing that. Most of them live in fairly average houses, drive nice, but not particularly ostentatious cars and have spouses that work just like everyone else.
Why?
A doctor and a lawyer got deadlocked in a mortal combat ;-).
a id02/M alpractice%20in%2021st%20Century%20-Sage.pdf
) .htm
Here is a research, and it would be interesting to get a comment from both of you:
http://sihp.brandeis.edu/council/pubs/Medic
Also, this page: http://sihp.brandeis.edu/council/Malpractice(3-03
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Hamburgers are cooked at a higher temperature but served at a lower (edible!) temperature. Why the hell do people go to the drive-through window for coffee that can't even be drunk until later that day?
Your attitude is one of prejudice and stereotype. You assume that every lawyer and doctor is filthy stinking rich because their profession is garunteed to make tons of money. That's like saying everyone who majored in economics in college is now a wall street hot shot, or every engineering major has a dozen patents to his name. The truth of the matter is that you have your rich and your poor professionals in any field, and it is simply ignorant to make uninformed presumptions like that. As a med student, let me fill you in on the lives that doctors live. After doing an undergraduate degree, you apply to medical school. The average debt of med school graduates is about 91K for public schools and 123K for private schools (http://www.amsa.org/meded/studentdebt.cfm). This is on top of any debt you have from undergraduate. Then, once you graduate medical school, you do your residency. The length of this residency can go from 4 - 7 years depending on which speciality you go into. Family practice has a shorter residency while surgery has a longer one. During this time, you get paid squat; 40K if you're lucky. Enough to live on in theory but at this point you're potentially 200K in debt already, and you aren't making nearly enough to pay this off during residency, so all most people can do is to just get a forebearance and let it accumulate interest. Compound this with the fact that you graduate medical school at age 26 if you're a traditional student who started straight out of college (a good percantage have a few years between undergrad and med school), so you could easily be married and have a family develop during your residency so there's another drain on your salary. Once you finish your residency, your salary goes up, but it's not instant money. Primary care physicians (internists, family doctors, etc) are on the low end of pay, though they typically have shorter residencies. Specialities like cardiac surgery have more salary, but insanely long residencies (surgical specialities have a long residency followed by fellowship and more crap then you want to deal with). Because the financial security of medicine is so much less than it used to be in the 60's and 70's, you have more people going into specialities than primary care becaus the money is better there, leading to increasingly critical shortages in many fields. So medicine is not a money tree that you can shake. Doctors, lawers, and yes even pro athletes are not rolling in dough. Not ever athlete gets the noteriety as A-Rod. There are many NHL players who barely peak the 100K mark, and major league soccer players are lucky to even get that high.
There are too many ignorant folks on juries...then again, the jury I was on was entirely professionals that all seemed to feel the same way about not getting out of the duty.
No kidding. I was on a jury (medical malpractice, no less) a few years back, with some fascinating people, including:
- The president of programming for Showtime (who gave us all copies of their remake of "12 Angry Men" at the end)
- The head of new technologies research for Citibank (who was pretty annoyed at that point that he couldn't get any funding for research on smart chip implementation because all the money was going into the Y2K bug)
- A supervisor in Customs at LAX (who, in spite of this being pre-9/11, had some great stories)
BTW, the guy's case was baseless, and we didn't get past the second question of the special verdict form. He was suing basically because he had no medical insurance and couldn't afford his doctor bills. Of course, if he'd sued his private practice doctor, the only one who made a legitimate mistake, he might have gotten somewhere... but instead, he sued the hospital doctors (presumably) because they had deeper pockets.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
I hope your feeling a bit better ya poor bastard.
.au so we drive on the left side of the road. The stupid dick turned right at the lights, ran into a skyline imported 3 days prior (the guy was on his way to GET insurance!)
My only tale like this is being involved in a 4 accident sitting stationary at an intersection.
(im in
the accident instigator crunched horribly and wrote both cars off, then hit my car and another with the rolling momentum) i was the only bastard in there who *HAD* insurance, and m car was the biggest shitbox of the lot.
The guy's insurance was rejected because he was 0.06, i had to claim off my insurance, and get them to whomp his ass for recovery of costs.
Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know when your gonna get food poisoning.
I just looked up the hospital my father works at. Its a non-profit suburban hospital in one of the wealthiest areas of the country. It has a 5 star rating for Obstetrics and has a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit which among other things requires an OBGYN to be on the premises 24/7/365. The complication rate for Obstetrics at this relative jem of a hospital is still 10% and that means that there are literally over 1300 events that do not go as well as hoped in that one specialty in that one hospital. And the premiums keep going up. Granted part of the reason that the complication rate is that high is because so many high-risk pregancies go there because of the resources avaialable.
s ea ction=mod&modtype=HRC&modact=HRC_profile&HGID=HGST BD757767210057
http://www.healthgrades.com/public/index.cfm?fu
Because of this, few years back, the patience insurance in Finland was renowated in such way that patients can get compensated for malpractices and complications that occur during their care without any actual wrong doing by the doctor being proved.
Of course, if doctors do things intentionally wrong or are criminally neglicent, they can be held responsible in the courts, but this rarely happens.
"There is a terrorist behind every bush"
Stories like yours make me shake my head in disbelief. I wonder sometimes if we might be better off without auto insurance. Just sue the guy who caused the accident and get rid of the middleman! Much of the time that's what you end up doing anyway.
I often think that insurance makes for bad drivers. If you are driving around with the thought in your mind that someone else will pay for your mistakes, are you not more likely to be careless?
Criminal penalties make a difference as well. I remember driving down to the tip of Baja California once, and being amazed at the courtesy and caution of the drivers with Mexican plates (excluding the bus and truck drivers, who drove like maniacs). Later I found that a moving violation there was a serious offense, and drivers took great care to avoid a citation.
And to round out this thought - I suspect safety features like airbags have the perverse effect of increasing the accident rate, since drivers believe they will be OK no matter how poorly they drive. (No facts to back this up...hey, it's /.! )
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
IMHO
- The first problem is that people in the US feel that they have a 'constitutional right' to sue. This is not the case. The constitution indicates that those accused of a crime have a right to a jury trial - not that those who feel they have been wronged have a right to a jury trial for a lawsuit.
- The second is that malpractice has no specific definition. There is very little distinction between bad outcomes and bad medicine. Even in the case of 'bad medicine' people are unwilling to accept human error as a plausable reason for why something might have happened. Remember that everyone makes mistakes - no matter how much effort one puts into not doing so
... it is called being human.
- The third problem is that people feel that they have a right to massive amounts of money. Remember, this money usually comes from the doctors own pocket - malpractice insurance is usually carried at the minimum level, if at all these days. It is too expensive for the doctors to do anything else. Anyone who has talked with a lawyer knows that one of the first principals in a lawsuit is to go after the deep pockets. The problem here is that the doctors hire lawyers and accountants to protect their money and then declare backruptcy after a verdict and the plantiff is stuck with either nothing or the minimum required for the doctor to keep his/her license in that state.
- The fourth problem is the disparity in costs for the plantiff and defendant in a malpractice case. The plantiff can have no out-of-pocket costs, and pay based upon contingency. The defendant must hire a lawyer on an hourly basis, which is rarely reimbursed even if a case is frivolous.
We need a solution that solves these items - I have some ideas and will post them later - just ran out of time.I think it's a much better idea to perform some sort of triage on patients who aren't paying for their healthcare. Those who have no hope of recovery shouldn't receive much treatment beyond what is necessary for them to remain comfortable and pain-free until death. And we should provide some minimum standard of healthcare for everyone but not necessarily the latest and greatest. If we continue to do that, then no one will be able to afford healthcare soon. Costs will just keep rising and the burden will be shifted onto a smaller and smaller group of individuals who can afford it as fewer people will be able to afford insurance. Eventually this will collapse like all pyramid schemes.