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.
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"
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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'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.
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.
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?
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
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!