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.
Unknown host pong.
I personally know a few doctors, and malpractice lawsuits have gotten out of hand. Insurance for doctors has skyrocketed to an incredible rate. Somehow there must be a balance between the two - let them sue, but not too much?
webpage
IN real life, there ARE patients who wind up sueing every doctor in town. There are patients who try to scam painkillers off of doctors, there are patients who try to forge perscriptions for Morphine at pharmacies.
Yes, some patients do have real legitimate cases, but if they wind up sueing more than 2 doctors, do you want to take them in as your patient? Why don't you pay thousands a month in malpractice insurance, and let me know what you will do. (No, I'm not a doctor, they're just in my family).
This all depends on the doctor. I'm sure he'll call up his friend Dr. Phil and ask why the lady was sueing him. If she was stepping on every word he said in his own office, then I'm sure the doctor won't take the case, as is his prerogative. You can't sue for abandonment if the doctor won't even take your case. Besides, the lawsuit record has been availible for some time, I could go online and search the plaintiff lists to see if my neighbor sued anyone recently. So can landlords and the rest of the world.
...it's a bad and dangerous thing... an inhumane thing!
Then again, in this litigious country, we all need to find ways to protect ourselves... there are probably very good doctors out there who just want to keep their jobs.
Kill the lawyers and the problem goes away.
If a doctor screws up, they pay the price. If a doctor won't serve you because you've sued someone in the past for malpractice (and won), what does that say about the doctor?
Although this is slightly irrelevent, my grandmother was given bad medication from a doctor that conflicted with her other medication. She was in the hostipal for quite awhile and is still recovering. We didn't sue because apparently we wouldn't get anything out of it, because she's on Medicaid or medicare or whatever. I don't know what action my mom is taking, or if he's right about the lawsuit deal, but eh.
This is a good thing for patients. If a doctor needs to check if you've had a record dealing with bad doctors, then he probably sucks (and knows it) too.
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
I would think that most doctors would realize there are situations where a malpractice suit is warranted and necessary.
Two weeks ago, the MA legislature passed a bill called Taylor's Law, that orginally called for putting reprimands of doctors online. The doctor lobby got that provision shot down, arguing that it might stop doctors from freely talking to the board.
If patients in MA can't find out who the problem doctors are, I don't see why doctors should be able to see the names of patients who sued.
Furthermore, membership should definitely be required to add people to the list, otherwise, any quack who gets justifiably sued can easily add his or her patients to the list out of spite.
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 :-)
There are a lot of wacko sue crazy people out there and doctors are a prime target for idiots to sue. If I were them I'd blacklist sue crazy people too. I dont think you should be blacklisted for being in the list once but 3-4 times starts to look fishy.
The problem is that both sides have bad apples. Sure you have some bad doctors that really shouldn't be practicing. But you also have some people who want easy money from malpractice insurance companies who are most likely to settle that to fight it out in court. The idea of lawsuits as a source of incoming isn't patented by SCO as yet.
Doctors are easy targets. They have money and there is no penalty for sueing them and failing because it's hard as hell to prove a patient is just taking pot shots. I'm glad to see that doctors now have recompense against people who are just trying for a quick buck.
I do security
First thing I read on their website was 'This is not a blacklist!'. Think they noticed the extra traffic?
So basically both the patients and the doctor get screwed and the lawyers come out on top.
This guy is way out there
"You can sue anyone, for anything, and you'll probably win."
The post puts a negative spin on the issue, and I CAN CLEARLY see why.
However, the system might be good for finding repeat suers, which could bring down the cost of malpractice insurance and possibly lower the cost of insurance, therefore helping a great many people. That's not to say that would necessarily happen. But if insurance market (which I know little about) was competitive (price driven), it might work out for the better.
still, I'd hate so see someone get hurt because their doctor wouldn't help them because a previous doctor took the wrong leg off.
Doctors might be able to turn away patients, but emergency rooms sure can't. So, in the end, somebody's going to have to try to treat these "blacklisted" people...
And people who go to the ER for something a PCP should be taking care of just drive up expenses and costs for everybody...
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?
I'm against frivolous lawsuits like everyone else, but this is like extortion. Imagine a patient is wronged by an incompetent doctor, and they sue for damages. Other doctors are basically saying that this patient likely will never get care again?
Texas already passed Proposition 12 last year capping jury awards for non-economic damages in malpractice cases to $250,000. So parents whose children have the misfortune of needing expensive medical care must be even more wary.
I guess these Texas doctors are saying, "Oh, you'll pay a pretty penny for care. But don't even think about holding our professional accountable for incompetence."
If these doctors believe there's nothing wrong with this list, I'd like to see a list of doctors who are members of that organization.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
This kinda of reminds me of going into a store and seeing people's bad checks on the wall....
People sue at the drop of the hat nowadays....and the lawyers are waiting in the shadows.
A person will NOT be denied life threatening health care...
but what if someone with a history of lawsuits(frivilous or not) wants high risk surgery from you? Would you be willing to bet your career and finanicial well being on them?
Information is freedom, right?
Is slashdot turning into USA Today or something. What's so nerdy about a dumb website?
I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
It's all very nice to have this database and that database, but who is going to search about these 'trouble-making' patients? I can imagine George Clooney comes back to E.R. and before fixing up a patient, he checks this database first.
Oh.. while we're at it, maybe some psychiatrists can use this database to get more patients if you know what I mean.
pardon the pun
not all cases are black and white, and there are definitly some patients who are more likely to sue than others (especially those who have sued before). Malpractice insurance is so expensive these days, losing a suit like this can get your coverage yanked effectively putting you out of business. While no doctor wants to sit there and screen patients based on the likelyhood of them suing, it is a reality that is part of the medical world today.
Yeah it sounds horrible in the case where the doctor really f'd up, but tons of malpractice cases are bullshit and really put a strain on the doctor's ability to do business.
If I was a doctor (in a non-emergency case), hell yeah I'd want to know if a patient has sued before and under what circumstances because this is about protecting my livelihood.
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"
There was a story some time back about a new housing development that was built, but had the restriction that no lawyers were allowed to buy any of the homes. The construction company feared that they would be sued if anything was wrong with any of the homes. This restriction was only discovered when a lawyer attempted to buy one of the homes. So he sued the company for discrimination.
Lawsuits are, and have always been, a matter of public record. Perhaps people who abuse the system should consider this fact.
Sorry, no sympathy for those on the blacklist.
sulli
RTFJ.
If doctors think this is a good idea why are they so opposed to keeping their own legal/discipline records away from the public?
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.
1. Patient Sues Doctor
2. Doctor's Malpractice Insurance Rises
3. Doctor Charges more to make up for increased Cost of Operation
4. Health Insurance costs rise to cover increased health care costs.
5. Go to step 1 until no one can afford health care any more.
6. Everyone dies.
I'd say this is pretty damn obvious. If I was a doctor, I want to damn well know if my patient was a litigous bastard.
How could I say to men: "Speak louder, shout! For I am deaf!"? -Ludwig van Beethoven
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Although I acknowledge that there are good reasons for suing a doctor, most of them are not. Doctors are human, they're doing the best they can.
If a treatment has a 80% chance of working, and 5% chance of killing you is it a mistake to recommend it? What if you'd die anyways, just 5 years down the road? You'd have 80% chance at life. I think most of us would agree that it's not a mistake to try it. If a patient dies because of that treatment - was it a mistake? I could see only one problem - that's if/when the doctor did not explain the odds/risks.
I see way too many people suing because they need to be protected from themselves.
Do you know what that part means?
if malpractice is real, the lifetime 'costs' of taking care of the incident is covered, plus a maximum of 250k for pain and suffering..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The situation is not a patient suing a doctor. It is patients who sue for 6 million because someone made a mistake , do some doctors commit malcious behavoir or willful neglicence. People make mistakes and because of this apprently a person needs 10million dollars to make it better. Malpractice insurance is out of control , it keeps all medical costs up and makes it harder for real people with real problems to get treatment. I don't think they would have created this website if the majority of lawsuits were either not exaggerated or under false pretenses.
linux based load balancer on the front end?
no big sig
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.
When I read this, an interesting question popped up in my mind - there's an implication that you might end up in this database if you sued for malpractice and won.
Actually, I suspect that the public record would reflect if you brought suit against a doctor and *lost*, too.
A)If this database becomes something that doctors or insurance companies really use, then I doubt that they would draw much distinction between winning or losing a case. B) Even if the database was only for patients that prevailed against doctors, I wonder how clean the data would really stay. And fixing your history on this baby must really be a nightmare (as if fixing Experian or one of the other credit companies isn't bad enough).
As a Canadian I can't even imagine not getting "free" medical care. It's nice not having to worry about that at least. Sure service may not be as fast as in the US but I suspect that has to do more with population density.
God, I wish I could think of a sig!
If patients in MA can't find out who the problem doctors are, I don't see why doctors should be able to see the names of patients who sued.
Because doctors are better than ordinary people.
That's the theory, anyway.
-kgj
-kgj
...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 can't help but notice that every single person who has posted anything remotely supporting the doc's in this situation has been modded down. Nice, slashholes.
The Democratic Party: We've been pussies since 1968!
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
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
The cost of malpractice insurance is incredible. A close relation pays something on the order of $50K/year in insurance; this in a rural, close-knit community in a low-risk practice (as compared to, say, pediatrics).
This isn't "anti-consumer" behavior, it's defensive medicine. A doctor that doesn't practice because he's sick of being sued every other week for bogus cases isn't doing anybody any good.
I wonder if all the "programmers" who rail on Slashdot would be willing to take responsibility for every bug they write? To the extent that they have to buy liability insurance in case somebody uses their shitty program to do something important? No, of course not--that's why all those licenses for "Open Source" half-assed hacks are littered with "Yeah, I wrote this, but if you use it for something important, IT'S NOT MY FAULT, NUH-UH, I'M JUST A FAT SLOB PROGRAMMER, FNORD! *snort snort*" But you'll moan about doctors that can (and do) make mistakes. Yeah, consistency sure is an overrated attribute.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Doctors and patients both have an interest in knowing about the litigation history of their counterparts. A patient complains of poor medical treatment, sues, settles and moves on to another part of the country, to deal with another doctor and another insurance company. While many patients have legitimate gripes, I for one can attest from personal experience that others are not.
Sometimes you can find out by discovery the patient's prior litigation history, and other times they lie. The bad ones, unsurprisingly, lie. Extensive investigation can disclose the lie, which pretty much nails the case, but when you don't, you have been stung, and the "professional patient" scores another scam.
For the most parts, doctors are honest and honorable, did as well as they could, and patients are honest and honorable, and were grievously harmed. Sometimes the injury was due to neglgence, other times not. Accordingly, the record of the existence of a lawsuit doesn't tell the entire story, not ever. But it is very, very useful information.
As a patient, you want to know if a doctor has a long history of being a defendant. As a doctor, you want to know if a patient has a long history of being a plaintiff. It may make your decision, or not, but it is information you would rather have at the outset of a relationship than not.
NONE OF THIS, however, is private information. While details of medical history are for the most part confidential, the existence of a plaintiff and defendant and a lawsuit are public record. It is just that clerk of court information isn't readily available to everybody.
It may not surprise you to know that for years, consortiums of plaintiff and defense attorneys have kept databases of expert witnesses, plaintiffs and defendants. The fact that the internet has made this information much cheaper and more readily available is, in my view, a very good thing.
Once again, the truth shall set you free.
The question is how the information is used. That is the issue.
Court cases are already public record, so there isn't a risk of libel/slander in this. Malpractice insurance is so bad right now that this is one way that doctors can protest. After the modern medicine collapses in ruin, people will look back, in hindsight, and say just how spoiled we all were (seeking perfection from human doctors and human doctors seeking high payment for the illusion of perfection).
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
A few states have databases of disciplinary actions against doctors, but that only shows up the really awful ones. With this database, you should able to find the ones that are merely mediocre, and avoid them.
"Are you in favor of automobile makers deciding that it would be cheaper to make settlements/pay death/injury lawsuits, than to repair the defective part known to injure people?"
McDonald's did nothing of the sort. They were selling nice hot coffee. Only people who did something stupid with it got hurt, and these were very few. It was not a case of "the rare BAD cup that McDonald's sold and covered up". The coffee the lady spilled was the same coffee at the same temperature that millions had consumed with no incident.
"It doesn't matter if she spilled the coffee"
Yes it does, unless you want a frivolous lawsuit. The incident was of her making,
"It's reasonable to expect that spilling coffee won't result in first degree burns to your groin, requiring tens of thousands of dollars of surgery."
Actually, at the recommended serving temperature, it WILL burn you if you do something idiotic like pour it in your groin. You can also blind yourself with a McDonald's plastic fork!
"The size of the settlement (later reduced in appeal) was the amount that McDonald's saved by continuing with a policy that seriously injured people"
It should have been reduced to 0, since McDonald's did nothing wrong. In fact, when the suit forced them to serve coffee that was too cold, the complaints soared.
"It's the method courts have used to attempt American car companies from doing the same thing."
Again, an inapplicable example.
As an American I can't imagine giving my government half of my income. Sure you may have free health care, but I suspect that has more to do with high taxes.
I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
1. Patient sues doctor for _real_ malpractice
2. Doctor puts him on blacklist
3. Patient can't get decent medical assistance
4. Patient goes to emergency room at great cost to insurance company.
5. Health Insurance costs rise to cover increased health care costs.
6. Go to step 1 until no one can afford health care any more.
7. Everyone dies.
How about we just kill all the lawyers? Every once in a while, you just have to start over.
Its a double edged sword...
Keep in mind the paitents can also create a web page of 'bad doctors'...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I've had arguments with doctors I know who take a highly visceral reaction to malpractice suits and jury awards. Nearly every one of them rails against what they perceive as a litigious US culture, and speaks with unquestioned confidence about how lawsuits are:
- driving up insurance costs
- unfairly assuming medical perfection
- making it unattractive or impossible to practice medicing in the US
What I find amazing is the fact that NONE of the statistics support any of these positions. According to two recent studies - one by the AMA and the other by the Harvard Public Policy school (?, I believe the Harvard Medical Practice Study) - both found that:
- malpractice, at least as defined by negligence, is fairly common
- of those with valid claims, only about 1% actually bring suit against a doctor
- of those who bring suit, only 1% are successful
This means that 1/100 of a percent of incidents of malpractice actually result in an award. Then you have the fact that the review committees in every case are made up of doctors and professionals, the act that an attorney who doesn't think a case is worth his effort or will reach an award won't even bother PURSUING the case, etc.
I'm also reminded of another study conducted in NY a few years back. If I remember correctly the study found that of all malpractice claims in the state less that 10 doctors were responsible for nearly 50% of the cases. Why were they practicing? Because the medical review boards hed declined to suspend their licenses for the incidents. These are people like the guy who operated on the wrong side of his patients skull, the guy who carved his initials into his patients abdomens etc.
You would think that after 30 years of schooling doctors - SCIENCISTS - would be intelligent enough to seek actual EVIDENCE to support their absurd claims; even the AMA disagrees with them! You'd think that GOOD doctors (and there are many) would be tired of paying exorbitant fees to subsidize the negligence of their incapable colleagues. You'd also think they'd be intelligent enough to bother examining the various mergers in the insurance industry and price increases in the face of decreased competition before leaping to absurd claims regarding jury awards and civil suits.
Bottom line: I'd like to see a comparable database of every doctor in the United States with every incident of potential malpractice, lawsuits, complaints, or peer review comprehensivlely outlined and available to the public. I'd like to see doctors held to a national standard of quality, put on suspension when there actions merit it, and suspended when they cross a threshold like ANY OTHER PROFESSION (say hello to the Bar). Will we see these things in the near future? No, because doctors have no interest in policing themselves and facing up to the truth of the situation.
The whole thing just makes me ill.
-rt
I've been wondering where skyrocketing malpractice insurance premiums would eventually lead. This sucks, but something like this had to happen, eventually.
We want a perfect medical system where mistakes are minimized as much as possible, which lawsuits will encourage. But the cost adds up in terms of the risk that this system exposes individual doctors to--basically, being sued out of business. Every doctor will make a mistake at some point in his/her career, and that mistake might cost him/her everything.
Strangely, though, the availability of insurance screws this up. Those huge punitive awards are meant to pressure doctors not to screw up, but since virtually every practicing doctor has insurance, the cost of a lawsuit is spread over all of the doctors in terms of high insurance premiums. Since the pressure isn't specifically directed to punish the doctor that screws up (more so than any other doctor), its impact is limited.
And actually, those huge damage amounts are also a side-effect of insurance. You can't impose a $50-million judgement on a doctor who might be worth $1-3 million or so. Juries get a lot more open to imposing huge awards when they realize that the direct payee of the award is a faceless insurance company. Of course, everybody gets hurt on the back end, but that rarely occurs to anyone.
Honestly, it makes a lot more sense to cap/eliminate punitive awards in these cases, and to impose mandated penalties on doctors who lose malpractice cases: revoke medical licenses, ban from practice for a specified period. It's not perfect, but it won't end up being as expensive as the current mechanisms.
I personally know a few doctors, and malpractice lawsuits have gotten out of hand. Insurance for doctors has skyrocketed to an incredible rate. Somehow there must be a balance between the two - let them sue, but not too much?
High insurances rates aren't being caused by malpractice lawsuits; they're being caused by the stock market tanking. The medical insurance companies' holdings took a massive beating and they're raising rates to compensate.
States(like Florida) that have passed caps on damages for malpratice have insurance premiums just as high as the rest of the nation.
Tort reform is about making screwups a low, predictable cost of doing business and lawyers have become convienient scapegoats for those who would like to avoid responsibility for their actions.
In the end, the biggest(and highest profile) awards inevitably end up being against companies and people that repeatedly ignored the problem. It's funny that for a readership that decries so many abuses by corporate America, an awful lot of Slashdoters seem willing to castrate one of few remaining ways an individual person can hold a corporation accountable.
In California there is a massive shortage of obstetricians (baby-deliverers) because it's such a risky job. If the baby is still born the parents will find someway to blame someone; it's just a natural reaction to a tragedy.
Unfortunately this leads to many trials that are unwarranted and yet the parents still win. Now you almost have to leave the state if you want to have a baby.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
If you want doctors to perform high-risk procedures (like delivering babies, certain surgeries, etc), you have to protect them from lawsuits. Many obstetricians have decided to stop delivering babies in certain states because getting malpractice insurance is too expensive - over $200,000 a year in some cases. This is largely due to the fact that if *anything* goes wrong in the delivery room, even things that no one could prevent, the parents often sue.
It is nice to say that a doctor should treat everyone and not discriminate against lawsuit-happy patients, but that is just not possible. A physician will not be able to stay in business if he or she picks up too many patients like that.
Another thing - If doctors can't pay for malpractice insurance, they can simply stop performing risky procedures or treating patients who have uncertain prognoses. But then who will care for the patients who only have a small chance of recovery? Will a doctor want to risk having the patient die and then having the family sue?
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.
You see it on tv every night. It's the same problem that has blown all forms of liability to assinine proportions.
IT'S THE LAWYERS. You see the ambulance chaser adds on tv every night. If you "think you were hurt" call us. We will sue anyone for any reason. They don't add that the only ones that make a nickel off of these suit are the lawyers on both sides.
Isn't it time for Game and Fish to open a season on Lawyers?
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Just files my taxes and I paid @ 28% not counting GST (which is put on non-food goods purchased in the store) which I can't quickly estimate. We pay more taxes but we get more. It balances out. If you and anyone in your family never gets sick you obviously win but...
God, I wish I could think of a sig!
As someone who grew up in and around doctors offices the vast majority of medical lawsuits at least in our small Texas town were brought by a small number of pathological people. Literally any visit to a doctor's office would be followed by a lawsuit.
While there are certainly people with valid complaints and suits, in my experience the system is so abused that this is a sad but logical outcome of years of frivolous suits.
He diagosed you wrong? That happens. Get over it.
My mom was misdiagnosed with cancer. She had chemotherapy and a hysterectomy(no more kids), but she's always suspected she was misdiagnosed. Now, 25 years later, she's have numerous and serious health problems related to the treatment that have nearly cost her life.
And while it pissed her off, she was willing to just 'get over it'.
Until she found the same doctor misdiagnosed DOZENS of women and had them undergo the same treatment. And nearly all of them are having the same health problems my mom is having now.
But hey, I guess that sort of thing just 'happens.'
Doctors want to make sure their asses are covered before they treat. They'll do so many unecessary tests to go from 99% sure to 99.5% sure. It's just measures to make sure they don't get sued. I guess it's surprise why US hospitals are so much more costly.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
What is insightful about the parent?
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
Then the question is, which scenario happens more frequently?
I would think that a doctor can recognize from the description of the case (which is being stored), whether or not a suit was for real malpractice. You leave a sponge in someone, yeah, I'd say a lawsuit was necessary.
Now, if you leave a Junior Mint in Someone, that's not worthy of a lawsuit, since, as we know, Junior Mints are great at staving off infections.
My guess is that the former happens more often than the latter, but I don't trust anyone.
"How about we just kill all the lawyers? Every once in a while, you just have to start over."
I'm down.
How could I say to men: "Speak louder, shout! For I am deaf!"? -Ludwig van Beethoven
It's funny you hear people complain about Canadian health care all the time. But you hear American complaining about their hospitals too. I find it's a bitch waiting 2 hours to see a doctor but come on. We have 1/10th the population spread out all over the place.
Plus the service varies depending on where you are. In Quebec, you often hear the outrage over what the government allows not what they deny.
God, I wish I could think of a sig!
In Soviet Russia, Doctors sue you!
"Anyone who quotes me in their
I'd like to see some proof of that statement. In my experience it's most likely that the majority of cases are legitimate, and the doctors are blaming the patients for thing whom they should be blaming the insurance racket.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
0. Doctor performs inappropriate care.
Need a Catering Connection
This is already modded as a troll, but I'll bite.
Insurance premiums for doctors are as much as (more?) $100k (depending on area, field, etc). Now, for an ordinary doctor that might not be a problem -- you just put your prices up. Insurance trebles? Put your prices up again. Much the same as white box manufactures don't have to worry overmuch about components fluctuating in price since their compeditors will have the same fluctuations. Do you get it? For the average doctor, this insurance won't affect their income at all.
But there are exceptions and they're not good ones. Imagine if you don't want to work fulltime, perhaps you've retiring or have just had a kid. Suddenly $100k goes from being $40 per billable hour to $80 per billable hour, and you can't compete. Conversely, doctors putting in more hours a week can spread the fixed cost thinner, and really rake in the money.
The premiums haven't changed the likelyhood of lawsuits (which is the goal of a higher price in a free market), instead they've made doctors work longer hours and not have families. Dunno about you, but I don't see that as a good solution to lawsuits with stupidly high payouts.
Oh, and don't think this just applies to malpractice insurance. Doctors get hit with all sorts of stupid bills ($1000 for a radiation licence that must be renewed every year at the same cost -- where the licence is just a piece of paper, no tests or checks!?) As above, this is generally just accepted with a shrug and prices passed along.
It would be a HIPA violation for the doctor to discuss anything about the medical work they performed on you unless the patient waives their rights. The site *claims* all of the information is derived from public information (ie, publicly accessible court records). Therefore all the information *could* be just fine and not violate HIPA. However if the doctor defendant posted the record himself and made any further comments other than referring to the actual lawsuit, then a HIPA violation exists. Make sense?
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.
If you do win at court have your lawyer ask the judge to seal the records. Cite the potential for discrimination by other doctors as the reason. If the case is open and shut you might just get the case sealed.
Umm... add it all up. Federal income tax, state income tax, FICA (7.5% visible + 7.5% hidden), sales tax, property tax. You're already probably giving the government about half of your income. And you're already paying the staggering healthcare costs for a most of old the sick retired people who aren't even working.
Somehow you've let people convince you that you should pay high taxes for other peoples' health coverage, but it would be somehow to your disadvantage if you were eligible for benefits under this system that you're paying for.
I could see this system being abused severely. I would not except this unless it only inludes patients who have sued more than once, thus eliminated the vast majority of legitimate patients from being unfairly targeted. Overall this will only help the insurance companies, they won't lower thier rates even if the lawsuits slow to a trickle, they've never lowered rates before without being forced.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
It's about time that the thieves who exploit flaws in tort law face some accountability. Put yourself in the shoes of a doctor who is constantly faced with the threat of lawsuits and pays 6 figure malpractice insurance premiums. Would you want to treat a patient who you know has sued someone else? The vast majority of lawsuits are frivolous, and I see nothing wrong with making their lives a little harder. Besides, these patients probably won enough money through their lawsuits to fly to another part of the country or the world whenever they need to see a doctor.
"THIS IS NOT A BLACKLIST. MANY PATIENTS HAVE MERITORIOUS CASES."
This is not something to remove ones' right to sue, this is a resource for doctors to do risk management. If they find somebody in there who sued because they merely didn't like the doctor's mustache or something, they can make a judgement call; but OTOH, if the plaintiff sued because the doctor stopped amidst (say) an open heart surgery to make his tee time, well, that is just the doctor being stupid, and he deserves to lose.
This sig no verb.
Every detail of my professional life, including my home address, any criminal arrests or convictions, lawsuits or disciplinary actions, is required by Florida law to be online.
http://ww2.doh.state.fl.us/irm00profiling/searchf
If I get arrested for DUI (not convicted, just arrested) I would have to undergo a years-long period of intensive intervention and probabtion, or I would lose my license.
If I have to undego all this, why shouldn't everyone be forced to undergo this sort of scrutiny???
Suck it up, people!
Steve
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.
If you run a small business, particularly one that serves the general public rather than other businesses, one of your biggest problems is lawsuits. You own a store, some clutz slips. You're sued. You own a laundry, someone pours bleech in their eye, you're sued.
We think of doctors as being very wealthy but they're esentially small business owners. Some, like pediatrics, don't even make much more than a senior developer. I believe that doctors are mandated to have malpractice insurance. If a doctor can say that she screens her patients for known suers, not only can she protect her business from suits, she can also negotiate a discount on her insurance premium.
This is not some faceless HMO cutting corners on care it provides. The HMOs can get the information on their customers anyway, they've got resources for that without the website. The website allows small private practices to know who they're dealing with. Looking at it that way, I think it's great, as it allows a person to know who they're about to enter into a business relationship with. This does not affect emergency care or hospital care. It only helps non-emergency private doctors.
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
Some/many/most doctors are opposed to having their discipline records public for the same reason you should say nothing if you're brought into the police station for questioning, even if you're innocent:
You have *NOTHING* to gain from talking. If you have a choice between two courses of action, and one will do you no good and may or may not cause you harm, and the other will also do you no good but definitely won't cause you harm, which course of action do you choose?
I also suspect that even if doctors maintain such a blacklist, they're probably also smart enough to filter out people from the blacklist on a case-by-case basis.
Either way, the REAL solution to this problem is to make malpractice covered by a patient's insurance company. If your doctor screws up, your insurance company pays the malpractice claim - that way people can choose to pay for the amount of malpractice coverage they want, instead of forcing everyone to pay for those who abuse the system.
paintball
Is that while many of the readers here equate this with a "blacklist" of individuals who have filed frivolous lawsuits, it is not. This is merely a listing of individuals who have sued, and the site makes no claims of judgment. From the site itself: "We acknowledge that many of the people in this database may be involved in meritorious malpractice suits." And "DoctorsKnow.Us does not judge fitness of claims." However, by making no claims (and, from the information I see, providing no details about the lawsuit), this site puts clients who filed lawsuits with merit alongside those who filed frivolous lawsuits. The implication seems to be that these are people Doctors need to know about and possibly be wary of.
The site's "Group Monitor" function, which regularly scans the DoctorsKnow.US database for specific names suggests that it's important that doctors need to be aware of any legal proceedings on the part of their patients, without placing any importance on the legitimacy of the claims.
Yes, this is merely a database of publicly available information, but by grouping the information in such a way, in such a venue, the suggestion is that doctors need to be careful about taking these individuals as patients, regardless of whether their case had merit. The thought that doctors could be using this information to turn down patients is highly disturbing.
Though there are, without a doubt, people who abuse the system, but this database groups the innocent with the guilty without any sort of discrimination. Do we really expect the doctors to, after finding a name here, to go and do further research as to whether or not the case was legitimate? Doctors are busy people and their staff are busy too. I fear that such a database will hurt the innocent who have exercised their legal rights just as much (if not more) than it will punish the guilty.
And they say that they're not a blacklist... just an informational database targeting a group of people a specific profession may not want to do business with... rrrrright... and I'm not computer geek... I'm just a very intelligent person who would rather spend time coding or doning computer related stuff instead of socializing...
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
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.
Well said, Doctor, well said.
This sig no verb.
However scared they may be, doctors would be breaking an oath if they refused to treat patients because they sued. All doctors take an oath at the time of their graduation that they will try to treat all patients who are willing to be treated. Although I doubt that it's mandatory to do this, it would definately be immoral to not treat somebody because they sued (well, in my opinon anyways). Does anybody know if the posted site checks to make sure the patient actually sued, and the doctor isn't just lying? I think that maybe if the person has sued twice, then a red flag should go up, but people have a right to sue if the doctor was just being plain careless.
What the fuck are you talking about? You can't burn yourself with 130-degree coffee. I could immerse you in 130-degree coffee and not hurt you. Not badly. However, 200-degree coffee can fuck you up pretty damn nicely, which is what happened. Serving 200* coffee is pointless, it keeps brewing in the cup while you drink it, and it burns. Why the hell are you so desperate to have them burn your fucking coffee that you're willing to sacrifice some old lady's clit for it?
Emphasis theirs.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
What if you were a Doctor and Darl McBride was your patient? How would feel about treating him? Knowing that sooner or later he would sue you if you made the slightist miscalulation - like not ordering an entire body CAT scan after he complained of cold related symptoms.
Also, Remember the lady that was supposedly stampeded at a Walmart sale around Christmas? Well it turns out that she has been pulling that stunt on several occasions and reaping a settlement each time. Would you like to treat her as a Doctor?
There are, it seems people that are born to sue.
The creation of this list is just a defensive reaction against are increasing litigious society.
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.
First, it's not a blacklist.. it's just a list. I believe the front-page of the site even boldy states that THIS IS NOT A BLACKLIST.
It's there for information.
"Oh, those evil doctors". Doctors are people to, and they run a business, and believe it or not, along with legitimate claims out there, there are a LOT of frivolous lawsuits against doctors... a lot of bogus malpractice claims. If you were a doctor, would you not want to know of your potential client had sued the last 5 doctors she dealt with?
Lawsuits are public record. The public is free to organize and create lists of doctors who have been sued for malpractice as well.
http://ww2.doh.state.fl.us/irm00profiling/searchfo rm.asp
Strange I have read all these comments and no one seems rather put out at the fact you have a Dr who is a drug addict (Dr. Merrimon Baker), who seems to be making lots of mistakes all over the place, like amputating the wrong leg .....
He is still practising, what sort of warped society allows thats.
And not because healthcare doesn't work when provided by the state (that it doesn't is mostly a myth pedalled by the people who make all that lovely money overcharging US citizen s for medical insurance and drugs), but amongst other things because you are better off being paid a state wage than paid a US wage and having to pay for the insurance.
Remember the problem with central planning is not usually quality but inefficient allocation of resources. I might have to share a doctors waiting room with such "horrors" as poor people. I might effectively pay a little more if I choose to see a doctor privately 'right now', but that is a lot better than having someone swiping my credit card before he'll scrape me up after an accident.
Sure. Obstetricians pay a near obscene amount, somewhere close to 100 grand a year in premiums, depending on whether premiums are capped in their particular state.
But the physicians don't pay these premiums, we do, in the form of ridiculous insurance payments of our own. Most of us end up overpaying for medical care while people who file nuisance lawsuits make easy money.
So if you don't sue, are you a chump?
Hypothetical situation: I'm a patient of Doctor A, and he is sued by lawyer B, representing plaintiff C; the suit goes in favor of the Doctor, but his insurance rates are driven to his breaking point and he has to shut down his practice. Would I then be able to sue lawyer B with another lawyer for taking up a bad case only in the interest of greed?
If so, there might be a counter to the problem of there being too many lawsuits (and not just against doctors). If we can turn the bad/greedy lawyers against themselves, might we be able to "get rid of them" (without violence!), therefore providing us with an increased chance of getting a "good" lawyer?
Also, what about countersuits? Can and are doctors fighting back with that tool?
~UP
Eat the Path.
Let's post the names of the lawyers in the frivolous suits, rather than the patients. Then THEY won't find doctors who will work for them. Or contractors. Or mechanics. Or cops. Or bankers. Or tech support people. Well, not sure about the last one. Do they hate lawyers in India, too?
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
"If it wasn't for lawyers, we wouldn't need them."
No Reggie Link for the Article
If you want to be able to help out your fellow slashdotter... create your link using http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink for now on.
Davak
So that you would do what? Not work for them? heh... I guess they'll just ship even more jobs overseas, creating even less demand for you over here ;)
--Justin Mitchell
"2nd Place is a fancy word for losing" --Bender (Futurama)
i'd like to see you perform brain surgery and not feel the pressure. the men and women in the medical field have it hard enough being expected to make everyone perfect without people like you making life harder.
The injured (burned) plaintiff in this case, 79 year old Stella Lieback, was not driving her car. She was seated as the passenger in her grandson's parked car, holding the coffee cup between her legs while removing the plastic lid. The cup tipped over and poured the scalding hot coffee into her lap causing third degree burns.
Before claiming something is baseless, first look at all the facts.
Fight Spammers!
Every patient file gets a mark like "b" for "blatherer" or "dab" for "dumb-ass blatherer".
But he does not share his knowledge about his patients with others.
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
In Massachusetts (where I am), all you have to do is point your web browser at the state licensing board and you can find out if there have been any malpractice judgements or settlements, or any disciplinary action against a phyisician licenced in Massachusetts. A few other states also offer this service. If your state doesn't, start complaining to your state representatives.
I have to wonder, perhaps this wouldn't be as big a problem as it is now if we had a more socialistic system of medicine. I don't know how the rates compare here in the us and in canada, but I'm willing to bet they aren't nearly as high. I know this cuts the rug out from under doctor's salaries, but people do have the right to health care in a time of emergency and the cost of such should not be prohibitivly high.
another way to defray this problem might be to force the loser to pay court costs. this makes it more risky......
dave~
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....
Certainly there are some doctors who knowingly abuse the system, and the same with patients - the problem is the patients who honestly don't believe they're wrong. A patient sued my father, an ophthalmologist, for giving him bad advice that ultimately resulted in him going blind. In the courtroom, it came out that a) the patient had gone to three other doctors seeking a particular diagnosis before coming to my father, b) my father told the patient what ultimately was shown to be the right diagnosis, c) my father proscribed eye drops for the patient and noted several times that he reminded the patient to take them in sequential visits, and d) the patient's condition could have only happened because he didn't take the drops.
The patient truly honestly believed that he had been cheated, and that it was my father's fault. Well, yes, he didn't take the drops, and went to two more doctors before he found one who would tell him they weren't necessary, but that's not the point. Or so he believed.
The way these things work, a lawyer agrees to take the patient's case without actually viewing the evidence. The doctors' lawyers must jump all sorts of legal hurdles in preparation for a trial, which often doesn't happen - at the last minute, the patient's lawyer finally looked at the evidence, told the patient he obviously didn't have a case, and the whole thing was dropped. After, of course, a good deal of money had been spent on the part of the doctors. Here's a case where malpractice insurance goes up despite absolutely no wrongdoing on the part of the doctor.
>Now your kids can't go to college, you have to sell all of your posessions, no insurance company will cover you
Right now there's a big battle between doctors and trial lawyers in regards to putting caps on damages regardless of how grossly negligent the doctor was.
Simply put, they want you to pick a side and this website and rhetoric about 'poor doctors' is a ploy to win the caps battle. Personaly, I refuse to take sides as both sides are losing propositions. A real solution would require regulating both doctors and lawyers and neither party wants that because that means less profit, thus little war of attrition.
The doctors (AMA) want me to give up my essential rights to sue for damages because they supposedly can't afford insurance.
The lawyers still want to be able to collect 1/3rd of my damages.
I think this situation shows a larger problem: people getting the shaft from two well organized and powerful lobbies. I'd rather see lawyers unable to collect so much from me and see medicine socialized/single-payment/regulated so I can actually see a doctor now and again. In the meantime its the wealthy vs the wealthy at the expense of you and me.
I think I read a comment that was made by a Doctor in this thread somewhere that touched upon something that people - especially Doctors - have sort of given up on. And that is Doctor/patient relationships.
Now I'm not saying ALL Doctors are 'heartless', but what I am saying is that the whole relationship dynamic has changed..
For instance, how many doctors do you know who make house calls? How many patients respect their doctor and have been going to the same one 'forever'? It just seems to me that many Doctors are only in it to make as much money as possible, and people in general are out to get as much as they can. Because of these outlooks, there is a clash.. and these clashes have caused a spiral that will not seem to quit.
The spiral is that the patients don't respect Doctors because they think they are money grabbers - and so think they are fair game to take legal action on for any little reason, Doctors don't give the patients the same service because the patients are trying to rip them off all the time and their own costs go up and up.. making them demand MORE money for their services, making the patients feel even MORE that they are money grabbers.. and so on and so on..
The only people making out of all this, are the insurance companies and the lawyers, and nobody likes them, but we ALL keep them in business in this 'spiral' we have created.
People need to remember that Doctors WILL take care of them, if they take care of the doctor.. they are human beings too, and you create a good relationship with them, and visa versa, then you will find that they can also be some of the most generous people as well!
Goes without saying, but IANADoc either
Syke
Absence of evidence, is never evidence of absence..
You might as well ask me to feel sorry for professional athletes, because they get in trouble for molestation and have to retire at a young age. Or dentists, because they get no respect from anyone.
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 am a husband of a family physician. She has been sued twice, and both times were totally bogus. First time, a kid died of carbon monoxide poisoning, at home, after the gas company had told the parents not to have the kid sleep in the kitchen, heated by the stove. The second time, she had been called by the emergency room physician late on Friday night to make sure the guy in the ER got an appointment on Monday. Despite doctor's orders to take it easy, he went running on Sunday and keeled over dead from a heart attack.
So why was my wife sued? Because she was a physician whose name was anywhere associated with the case. Lawyers don't bother to think before they sue, they just sue everybody they can, and let the courts sort them out. Courts do a decent job of that, but only after lots of money spent on defense attorneys and lots of emotional anguish. Yes, lots. My wife went into medicine to help people, and it hurts when she is accused of malpractice without any basis.
This doctorsknow.us is still reprehensible, though. I have heard lots of stories of doctors that should have been sued, thanks to really, really piss poor medicine resulting in injury and death. The funny thing: they didn't get sued.
Malpractice is great in theory, but not in practice.
This web site would be useful, if only they would have some rating system for "deserved" and "bogus". Trust me, doctors can tell the difference.
----- Why sig when you can sign? PGP key id 7675D05E
an irony is that until recently the DOCTORS were the object of the abusive jokes. ever come across all the dusty wisecracks about golf days on wednesday, take two aspirin and call me in the morning, and so on? they were not founded in love! i am curious why the crosshairs drifted away, are we more eager to believe in our doctors now?
speaking of troublemakers, i have yet to see a situation where mentioning i am a lawyer has been the least bit helpful, except maybe in chatting with other lawyers (i.e., i know the language). this is pretty much bigotry, judging people before you know them, but many lawyers have done nothing to help the situation. the few impugn the many.
on the other hand i would not want a doctor who made such foolish judgments. none of the ones i've dealt with has let on anything like it. before i went to law school i worked at a hospital and the doctors uniformily expressed disappointment i was going (they of course figure they're the best profession), but none concluded that i was dishonest let alone a troublemaker. besides, they should worry about sleazy clients in general -- all one needs is to hook up with a sleazy lawyer and off they go!
just be careful who you pick on, to join in validates the whole system and YOUR group may be next up! needless to say, i don't mention my profession, although i'm happy to talk about who i am.... (a nice guy, i like to think, occasional slashdot contributor, and so on; the profession says little)
If you don't make awards large enough to actually hurt, they'll be ignored. If an HMO will make $5 million by denying necessary procedures, they'll happily do so if they figure 5 patients will sue and be limited to $250,000 each. Or how bout that doctor in the article who was addicted to painkillers, left a sugical sponge inside a patient, operated on the wrong hip, and amputated the wrong leg? This guy probably makes a lot better money as a surgeon than he would at anything else he could do, so if he gets fined $250,000 every five years he'll just write it off as a cost of doing business.
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.
Ambulance chasers only come about with the advance of capitalism and greed. We all take part in the big western hate machine. Point the finger at yourself, before anyone else, sir. We are all guilty here.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Come on guys... stop bashing lawyers!
Who are you going to call when some redneck, hick cop with a highschool equivelancy diploma and a gun and a badge does an illegal search of your apartment? You were intimadated and perhaps even threatened, now what are you going to do?
You're gonna call a lawyer.
Don't fear lawyers. Fear government agents (police officers) that think they can do whatever the hell they want because they have guns and badges and attitudes of playground bullies. The Constitution has elements that require the government (Fed, state and local) to follow certian rules. Cops can't kick your door down w/o following the proper procedures. If they do, call a lawyer and bust their ignorant, uneducated asses. Cops can be bullys. Lawyers can bully them right back.
Lawyers give us (the common people) the chance to stand-up for ourselves. Don't deride them. Be thankful they're here to help us.
If Darl comes in again, make him sign a relase for that saying that he won't sue you. Then follow the advice for treating Darl McBride's usual ailments.
Valium, cooling blankets, acetaminophen (Tylenol), thrombolytic drugs and cardiac catheterization may be needed.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
I can't imagine giving the government 25% of my income to support a military that hasn't done anything useful in over 50 years. Why not privatize your military? You could rule the world at a fraction the cost!
The REAL solution is a loser pays system. That way, doctors will not be sued unless it is a case that will definately will in court. For those who say that some people with real legitimate claims will step away from suing are ignoring a very key point: a loser pays system will only result in legitimate claims being brought to court. Those who have doubts that they will lose can instead buy insurance. That's right, insurance. People with legitimate, but precarious, claims can be insured in case they lose. The insurance company will pay all the defendent's legal fees in case the defendent wins. If the plaintiff wins then the insurance company and the lawyer will both get a sizeable amount of the reward. The amount lawyers recieve will decrease since there will be less of an incentive for lawyers to offer their services. In the loser pays system, only the right side wins. Those who disagree can look at the European countries where this system has been adopted and see for themselves the result of such a system.
Nice to know that you can get blacklisted for suing the doctor that caused massive brain damage to your kid
And it's nice to know you're adept at expressing a biased, one-sided comment that absolutely destroys any credibilty you had in posting on this very complex topic of doctors and lawsuits.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
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?
There are plenty of sites that list bad doctors in a similar manner. This is just the checks and balances system of information pooling at work. An informational detente, so to speak.
Many doctors are good, talented and qualified docs. However, there are also a lot of doctors out there who just screw up. Now, if you're in most any other professions, it's fine to make mistakes. But not medicine.
That's because people die when you don't pay attention. For example, it's okay to forget to hit spell check if you're a student. You get a lower grade for bad spelling, but so what. Hey, you just forgot. It's not like it hurt anybody.
But it's not okay to forget to take out all the sponges and staples after surgery if that's what the protocol requires. It's not okay to forget to read the patients chart who desperately needs a certain prescription, but who doesn't get it because the doc didn't do the review. It's not okay to make stupid mistakes.
Because the bottom line is when that happens, innocent people are catastrophically injured or killed. Innocent people. When that happens, it's the doctors fault, and that doctor should pay.
It's the only avenue for the injured to seek justice.
I think the real solution to this problem is stopping BS lawsuits before they even go before a jury. To this end, I think that the US legal system should institute preliminary hearings for civil cases. In these hearings, the plaintiff would present his case and call his witnesses. The defendant would be able to cross examine the plaintiff's witnesses, but not call any of his own. The judge would then determine if the plaintiff had enough evidance to procede with his lawsuit. If he did, the lawsuit would procede with no penalty to the defendant. If, however, the plaintiff did not have enough evidance, he would have to pay the defendant's legal fees. I think this would go a long way towards reducing frivolous lawsuits of all sorts, not just malpractice suits.
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
... because the country isn't chock-full of frivolous lawsuits against doctors.
All the while, we're seeing fewer and fewer people go to medical school, ob/gyns are closing up shop to avoid lawsuits, yet law schools are graduating more and more lawyers.
I can hardly wait another 20 years when it's damn hard to find a decent doctor, between the threat of lawsuits and the mountain of government paperwork and expense they're all buried under.
Sure we can, its the WWW. That's how it works. I wonder if the story submitter got permission first? From the TOS page:
Linking to the Web Site.
You may provide links only to the homepage of this Web Site, provided (a) you do not remove or obscure, by framing or otherwise, advertisements, the copyright notice, or other notices on this Web Site, (b) you give Provider notice of such link by sending an email to support@doctorsknow.us, (c) you discontinue providing links to this Web Site if requested by Provider.
#
TOS be damned, slashdot them anyway.
Unknown host pong.
Doctor-turned-engineer here. I have no personal experience with being sued for medical malpractice. My impression is that lawsuits are not triggered by the actual bad event, but by personality differences between doctors and patients.
Sick people often get sicker, and sometimes die. Many (not all) lawsuits seem to me to be caused by the fact that something bad happened, and the doctor and family didn't communicate well. What's frustrating as a doctor is that the "something bad" isn't always due to something the doctor did wrong, or could have done differently.
It seems like being a smooth talker is more important than practicing effective medicine. But I guess witch doctors have known that all along -- they don't ever seem to get sued.
Anyway, two abstracts from the New England Journal of Medicine. At least the profession monitors itself occasionally.
Volume 335:1963-1967
December 26, 1996
Relation between Negligent Adverse Events and the Outcomes of Medical-Malpractice Litigation
Troyen A. Brennan, M.D., J.D., M.P.H., Colin M. Sox, B.A., and Helen R. Burstin, M.D., M.P.H.
Background We have previously shown that in New York State the initiation of malpractice suits correlates poorly with the actual occurrence of adverse events (injuries resulting from medical treatment) and negligence. There is little information on the outcome of such lawsuits, however. To assess the ability of malpractice litigation to make accurate determinations, we studied 51 malpractice suits to identify factors that predict payment to plaintiffs.
Methods Among malpractice claims that we reviewed independently in an earlier study, we identified 51 litigated claims and followed them over a 10-year period to determine whether the malpractice insurer had closed the case. We obtained detailed summaries of the cases from the insurers and reviewed the litigation files if the outcome of a case differed from the outcome predicted in our original review.
Results Of the 51 malpractice cases, 46 had been closed as of December 31, 1995. Among these cases, 10 of 24 that we originally identified as involving no adverse event were settled for the plaintiffs (mean payment, $28,760), as were 6 of 13 cases classified as involving adverse events but no negligence (mean payment, $98,192) and 5 of 9 cases in which adverse events due to negligence were found in our assessment (mean payment, $66,944). Seven of eight claims involving permanent disability were settled for the plaintiffs (mean payment, $201,250). In a multivariate analysis, disability (permanent vs. temporary or none) was the only significant predictor of payment (P = 0.03). There was no association between the occurrence of an adverse event due to negligence (P = 0.32) or an adverse event of any type (P = 0.79) and payment.
Conclusions Among the malpractice claims we studied, the severity of the patient's disability, not the occurrence of an adverse event or an adverse event due to negligence, was predictive of payment to the plaintiff.
July 25, 1991
Relation between malpractice claims and adverse events due to negligence. Results of the Harvard Medical Practice Study III
BACKGROUND AND METHODS. By matching the medical records of a random sample of 31,429 patients hospitalized in New York State in 1984 with statewide data on medical-malpractice claims, we identified patients who had filed claims against physicians and hospitals. These results were then compared with our findings, based on a review of the same medical records, regarding the incidence of injuries to patients caused by medical management (adverse events). RESULTS. We identified 47 malpractice claims among 30,195 patients' records located on our initial visits to the hospitals, and 4 claims among 580 additional records located during follow-up visits. The overall rate of claims per discharge (weighted) was 0.13 percent (95 percent confidence interval, 0.076 to 0.18 percent). Of the 280 patients who had adverse events caused by medical negligence
In the last three months, I have picked up prescriptions at the pharmacy, only to find out twice that I had the WRONG medication.
Once it was clearly labeled wrong and the other time it was the wrong strength medicine in a correctly labeled bottle.
I recognized the difference in both cases. In my health care, I am the final barrier to a mistake being made.
So, are we saying that I should be sueing the pharmacy, even though I never took any of the wrong pills?
How about when I had my first bone marrow biopsy done? I still limp on that hip when a pressure front comes thru (10 years later). Apparently the doctor knicked something when the probe went thru. Should I have sued for that?
I got the diagnosis of cancer from that test, and they were able to save my life because of it. Was the trade of limping worth my life?
Common sense is needed here.
Income tax is not the sum total of all taxes. His statistics are valid enough for income tax, but that's hardly the whole story. The average working stiff pays almost nothing in income taxes; perfecly true. However this does *not* mean that the average working stiff pays no taxes. Most people pay the vast majority of their taxes in the form of payroll taxes. Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, FICA, etc. Those are only the Federal taxes, of course. Local taxes (sales tax, property tax, telephone tax, electricity tax, gas (both methane and petrol) taxes, etc) are a hefty bite as well. Social Security alone accounts for a huge bite out of the average person's paycheck and is also one of the most regressive taxes in existance. Only the first $86,000 a person makes are subject to Social Security tax, which means that 100% of my income gets hit with Social Security tax, but less than .001% of Bill Gates' income is subject to SS tax. A politician who proposed leveling SS taxes would get my vote immediately and without reservation.
The upper 1% of the population pays around 33% of all tax money that goes to Washington. Yup, absolutely true. The thing is that the upper 1% has around 33% of the money. On a dollar for dollar basis they actually pay slightly less than the lower 50% do. Far from being overtaxed, the upper 1% are (assuming that everyone should pay an equal percentage of their wealth) slightly under taxed.
As for the writer's conclusion that we ought to consider limiting the franchise to people who pay X dollars in (watch his language here) *income*taxes* it sounds like he's just dying to establish a classic plutocracy. Those in power, now possessing exclusive voting franchise could quite easily define "income tax" to exclude incredibly large portions of society while increasing the various non-"income taxes" with impunity. Taxation without representation anyone?
On a practical note, I will point out that every single member of the elected Federal government, as well as every single member of the past 5 president's Cabinets, falls into the upper 1%. Most fall into the upper 1/10th of 1%. The economic elite are hardly underrepresented in government; quite the opposite really (side note: I refer to their income prior to becoming a member of government here). I personally would like to see just *one* person in the Federal government who falls into the "lower" 70%. I will observe that the Federal government (under past administrations as well as the current administration) seems quite content to emplace policies that primarially benefit the economic elite, while occasionally tossing a bone to the rest of the nation. What baffles me is that people keep voting for government by, of, and for millionares...
History has shown us that while voting requirements often sound good on paper they never really work in practice. Just like Communism, or lassie-faire capitalism, its an idea that simply does not work in the real world. Inevitably the best intentioned voter requirements become nothing more than a tool of oppression. In my own ideal fantasy world you couldn't vote unless you displayed a knowledge of the *facts* in current affairs. The difference between me and the person who wrote the article you reference is that I'm mature enough to know that my fantasy won't work in reality; he doesn't seem to have reached that point yet.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
If the database only included people who have, say, filed two claims that were both rejected by the courts, then I'd be okay with it. There are some people out there who will sue for everything that is completely baseless, and these people shouldn't be allowed to keep wasting doctors' time and money.
If the lawsuit was successful on the other hand, then this isn't the way to go. Either it was a valid claim, in which case there is no fault with the person who sued, or it was an invalid claim that was somehow upheld by the courts, in which case the proper remedy is legislation to change that.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Correct me if I am wrong but doesn't this violate
:)
the confidentiality between doctor and patient? I guess
when you sue a physician, confidentiality is out the window?
Sounds like it is time for patients to start a "This Doc is a Quack" web page.
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.
... ideas from SCO.
After all they have a patent on that business process.
http://saveie6.com/
This is completely reasonable. Some patients are just way more likely to sue. With malpractice insurance costing what it costs, the doctors are just avoiding risk, and they will see fewer patients and make less money due to this.
Amazing magic tricks
the people who conduct the frivolous lawsuits against doctors who really did nothing wrong? We seem to disregard that fact that countless people who are treated with nominal injuries get it in their head that they deserve a cut because the doctor was a little rude of squeezed their hand too hard. So hence forth they get a lawyer and sue the crap outta the doctor who did NOTHING wrong. With the cost of malpractice insurance these days, it is no wonder there are more and more doctors run outta business because they cannot meet the cost to protect their own asses. Whoever said this blacklist was for those who deserved to sue?
But... What about IBM's lawyers who are heroically defending the Free World(r) against SCO?
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
I work support for a medical practice management software company, and take an analogous attiude toward how I work with my patients, er, customers (who might include you for all I know). When they are receptive to the approach, I enlist them in managing their computing experience. I educate them on how to avoid some problems, and some common troubleshooting steps they can use before that first call to Support.
I have created one-page 'cheat sheets' to fax or email explaining how to roll back a Win98 Registry, or do XP System Restore, (collectively, the second thing to do with a suddenly-malfunctioning Windows PC, right after trying a cold boot). I've built some shell scripts for the *nix servers that allow them to quickly handle some routine maintenance tasks that previously would have required a Support tech to dial into their system. I explain in non-technical language why I want them to try various things to diagnose/resolve a problem, rather than talking down to them as if my expertise (relative to theirs) were a license for condescension.
So now instead of being impotent, helpless, hopeless and frustrated (ultimately taking that frustration out by complaining to our management or even getting lawyers involved), they feel empowered. Since they have participated in their 'treatment' they are substantially less likely to complain about it or sue somebody. The smart ones (like you) know this approach works with their patients, and recognize it when I use it on them.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
If McDonalds Coffee is "so hot that, if spilled, it could cause third degree burns, which would burn through skin and down to the muscle in less than three seconds" then why dosen't it burn through the lining of the esophagus and into the muscle in the time that it's being swallowed?
If it can cause third degree burns in less than three seconds, then it should cause second degree burns in even less time than that, so why didn't Mickey Dee's have lots of people running around with blisters on their tounges?
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
If there ever is another Civil War in my lifetime,
So what makes it "Civil" war?
"Excuse me, dude. But would you mind holding still while I shoot you?"
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
Shouldn't take antibiotics if it can be avoided. The overusage is already causing very nasty dominant bacteria to appear. The other thing is that people don't take their whole prescriptions, thus creating resistant strains by allowing immunity to build up in bacteria.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
Move to Canada. We wont miss you.
I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
Exactly the point I was going to make.
Maybe it's BECAUSE all the smart people are getting out of jury duty that the justice system is so screwed up these days?
...the reason a lot of people go to america for potentially lifesaving, new techniques is not because you have a great health system, far from it, but because you have exhorbatant amounts of money poured into research so that you can "rule the roost" as it were in the scientific community.
I am NaN
Strange being that Houston (in south Texas) has the worlds largest Medical Center?
I don't want a pickle; I just want a Motor-Cycle! A four foot cop arrived with a five foot gun!
and save doctor's asses every day by not carrying out the mistakes they make, yet only get paid 1/2 to 1/4 what they make.
bun-fhuinneog agam!
When doctors go on strike, the death rate goes down.
The American Medical Association said that it had just learned of the group and that it saw no ethical issues at stake.
"There's no question that physicians are totally frustrated by the relentless assault on the medical profession by trial lawyers,"
My father-in-law is a radiologist. He's had a few suits launched against him. Is he perfect? .... no. Is he negligent? hell no!!!
Recently a chain-smoker's family (daughter) came after him (amongst others) and claims that her dad wasn't warned soon enough about his lung cancer and the risks of smoking. My father-in-law only came in on the case (medically, not litigiously speaking) later as it was. This BTW .. because cause he lost his job since they could hire a youger, less-expensive radiologist who did less prone-to-malpractice suit types of readings. He was also asked if he warned the chain-smoking dude that smoking might lead to something like lung cancer. The suit has been carried forward by one of his daughters while the rest of the family stood by embarrassed of it all. Do doctors deserve fair warning against such a patient? In my opinion, yes. Do all people who have sued and won on malpractice deserve to be 'black-listed' ... no. Do some deserve it ... I'm sure. Question is how to determine that ... ??? The only thing I can think of is full-disclosure ... on both ends!
In most cases, the insurance company & the doctor decide to settle (guilty or not) and try send everyone home as happy as is possible and without breaking everyone involved financially. That doesn't tell anything about who was or wasn't negligent. I do think however in a case that was clear negligence, the doctor needs to be yanked from the profession just like drunk drivers should have their licenses yanked until they show they are not a threat to others in that position. But we see how good we are at taking drunk-drivers off the road, right? And it appears it's not much different for negligent doctors in many cases. And let's not even start on the number of patients who take no responsibility for their own health and expect the doctor to prescribe it to them in a bottle.
It's just sickening to see America(ns) looking for someone else to blame everything on and the lawyers getting fat and rich at the continual inflow of work due to hunt down someone else on which to drop the accountability. This will continue the trend of the brightest people going where the money is ... practicing law, not into science and medicine. Where will that leave us then? With even sharper/sneakier lawyers ... great! That's just what we need isn't it!?!?!?!
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
To answer your question, yes, there is something that can be done. Certain legislations have batted around the idea of malpractice payout caps, restricting it to say nothing more than $100K. Some states, like Florida, have passed certain types of caps. If you want more info, you should check out www.medrants.com and do a search for "malpractice" -- it's a site managed by a physician. Now the problem with caps is that one state may have such an enticing package that MDs will flock to it and other states with policies less enticing to physicians will experience a "brain-drain" of sorts and will lose their health care staff. So what? you say? Well, imagine that your state is understaffed with MDs -- so that means that the ones who are practicing will be overworked. Lets face it, MDs aren't gods and so being overworked WILL lead to mistakes and mistakes may lead to lawsuits and increased payouts. Increase number of suits lead to higher malpractice insurance and the rise in cost to MDs forces many to just stop practicing or limit their practice and the vicious cycle continues (i.e. less MDs in the field, and overwork those who are practicing). If you don't believe this is happening, then you have to check out the state of healthcare in states such as West Virginia.
Now imagine how litigation will influence the minds of potential future MDs. After 4 years of med school, plus 4 years of residency, you're in the hole with around $80-100K in debt -- that's a very daunting situation to many. And if your future is questionable as to whether or not you can pay that off, you can imagine that not many will elect to go that route. Even worse, the best and brightest among them will go elsewhere in terms of their career choice and so you end up with individuals who may be less suitable to practice medicine. And so it goes back to less and less available MDs and soon the healthcare system may come to a crisis. I realize that this sounds like a doomsday situation, but the healthcare system is so wrought with problems that are so overwhelming that many lawmakers have no idea where and how to start -- some concentrate on drug costs, others concentrate on universal healthcare insurance, others talk about malpractice caps, etc. I am biased to place some of the blame on "ambulance chasers" -- there is just so much the medical profession can do to restructure and to revamp their image. But the bottom line is, MDs have been so demonized in the media in the past that their numbers may be dwindling, and where will the healthcare system be without enough of them?
Linux at home
He is not talking about "medical insurance premiums" that are going through the roof mostly because more and more Americans gobble more and more prescription drugs as well as get sick.
He is talking about malpractice insurance that is making doctors' practices less and less profitable. Doctors in the US work like crazy, but these malpractice rates, especially in the high-risk specializations (ob-gyn, neurosurgery, et al), cause a lot of grievances since these money come straight from the doctors' pockets.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
they changed it to say that after the website got publicity.
sulli
RTFJ.
As a patient who has been on the "wrong side" of malpractice, all I can say is that this blacklist is bullshit.
In my case, the surgeon performed the wrong procedure on me. He simply didn't read the orders correctly and screwed up.
Happily, it wasn't a kidney or leg that had to come out. But I can tell you that it put me through a lot of pain, left permanent damage, and was just a huge crappy event in my life.
Being young at the time (under 20), I was stupid and didn't sue. Should have. This guy had no real right to practice. I'd be happy if he couldn't afford his malpractice insurance. This guy shouldn't have been in the business, and it would have been good for EVERY ONE of his patients if I sued his ass off. Why anyone would want to keep this guy in the business is beyond me.
So don't tell me about doctors needing relief. I have several friends who are MDs, and they're all doing just fine and have little to complain about. Perhaps it's only the bottom feeders who have this problem.
After all, there are many lousy doctors out there. Just ask any doctor.
http://www.triallawyersinc.com/html/part01.html
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
People are smart enough to sip hot coffee untill it cools down, but not smart enough to not fumble with the top while its in their lap... and i think you forgot to close your i tag :p
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
In both states, sexual orientation and identity are added to the protected classes lists (ie covering gays, lesbians, transsexuals, etc)
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
The total crap part is that you can sue ANYTIME after birth and claim that the doctor that delivered you caused any problems that you have now. I personally talked to a doctor that is being sued by some parents because their child didnt get into the college they were planning on, so they sued the doctor for causing long lasting brain damage 18 years after the birth. The really sad part is the doctor lost the lawsuit and is now repsonsible for paying millions of dollars of damages to the family. And let me say, this is a totaly normal kid who simply didnt get high enough grades on his entrance exams to a college, not some highly deformed retarded human being.
You make some points and I'm well aware that some crazy things happen in our fscked up legal system but come on.
If you are going to cite something as outrageous as that you need to provide some sort of proof or at the very least a little bit more information into the story. Because right now it's just not passing my BS meter. (Asking the mods to do the same on the other hand heh...)
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Fight Spammers!
Good Samaritan laws (which is amusing if you know the history of the Samaritans... which is why their being a good one was noteworthy) normally protect someone... The general rule of thumb is that if you are trying to help, as a good samaritan, you are immune from lawsuits... It's the type of law that is on the books to protect people that are being good Americans from our out-of-control legal system.
There is probably a medical ethics law or something similar that you are thinking of.
There are already websites that allow people to check on the background of their doctor. Why shouldn't they be able to do the same with patients? The internet is for all.
Open Source Sushi
US doctors are in it for the MONEY - not the PATIENTS. Hell, my father was part of an on-going program (begun in 1974 IIRC) at Brown University to teach 4th and 5th year med students "Balint Medicine" which is basically about developing the doctor-patient relationship - because US doctors are so poor at it.
Remember - in the litigious culture of the USA frivolous lawsuits abound - and a malpractice suit effectively destroys a doctor's livelihood.
So, you're working in an industry where you deal with sick people, and those people die. So what? People die. And if you help ease the suffering of 99.9% of them, and 0.01% are accidentally hastened to their demise - so what?
This is probably gonna cost me Karma - but I don't care: It's about time for a reality check, and that reality check is that doctors are SELDOM to blame for someone dying.
People think surgery is "safe" - but the fact is that anaesthetics is an art more than a science, and people can die simply by being anaesthetised - and IT'S NO ONE'S FAULT!
One of the strange-but-true-facts is that in New York in the 70's, when doctors went on strike for a period, the deathrate actually DROPPED.
By and large, medical misadventure is more common than negligence, and accidents happen - which is a good reason to be hospitalised in the firt place!
Health care in the USA (and in other western cultures like New Zealand, where I am from) is of a very high quality - but the big problem is that the cost of administering medicine is obscene.
Did you know that triple-heart by-pass is one of the most common surgeries in the USA? At a cost of around $50,000 (at least) for each one. Now, I don't know about you, but I think a country can't afford to practice medicine like that.
Back to the lawsuit issue: my Dad was (erroneously and mistakenly) sued for mal-practice by a stupid woman whose husband died. Needless to say, the suit failed, but I remember my Dad being more worried about that than anything else in his career which spanned nearly 40 years of general practice and university teaching.
And think about this: do you really want to be cared for by a doctor who is being consumed by worry about a pending lawsuit? No - I didn't think so.
FYI, when we lived in Rhode Island, my Dad didn't even have a full practicing certificate because his NZ qualifications were Mb.CHb, Dip. Obst., FRNZCGP, and FRCS, but because he wasn't an "MD" he could only have a "teaching certificate" where they dealth with real and simulated patients.
Anyway, the malpractice insurance for his "limited" licence was more per week than the ANNUAL malpractice insurance he had in New Zealand.
Just something to think about.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
a list of doctors that have been sued. I think I would be interested in knowing if the doctor that was going to cut my chest open had been sued multiple times.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
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
I was talking more specifically about rural south Texas. I didn't state that explicitly because assumed anyone in Texas would have heard about the situation and know what area I was referring to.
Very often said Good Samaritan laws have protections in them which make such a scenario impossible. If your cardiologist friend lives in MA, for example- he needs to speak with a lawyer, because he was fully protected.
I imagine even if he wasn't, its the sort of thing that wouldn't raise his insurance premiums one iota(at least not directly). Sorry, but I'm -really- tired of hearing doctors, driving $100,000 cars, living in multi-million-dollar homes, with trophy wives and 6 weeks vacation on some private island...whine about how rough it is that their insurance just costs so gosh darn much.
Ever looked at medical stats? We have shit for medical care in this country- some of the highest malpractice, fatality and complication(ie, go in for one thing, come out with something else) rates in the world; our doctors and nurses are, for the most part, completely incompetent by modern standards. Some(staph infection, for example) are simply because doctors are --too fucking lazy-- to wash their hands properly. At a DC doctor's conference on infection control, barely 1/4 of the mens room users even so much as washed their hands under running water!
Please help metamoderate.
"Although I would love to blame increasing insurance rates on the lawsuits, it is really that our society demands that people receive the best possible medicial care"
A large proportion of US citizens (approx 40%), have jobs that don't include medical insurance and dont pay enough for them to take out their own medical insurance. These people recieve a level of healthcare that is almost the lowest in the industrialised world.
If they are unfortunate enough to need the services of a hospital for a member of the family then they are usually charged 30% to 40% more than a HMO is charged. For a minimum wage family the costs of a hospital stay can often only be met by selling the family home and most their possessions, still leaving them with debts .
US citizens have consistantly rejected the view taken in Europe, Canada and elsewhere that a civilised society should attempt to provide all of its citizens with decent healthcare. Yet in Canada it costs far less [per person] to provide everyone with decent healthcare than it costs to provide healthcare for the lucky 60% of US citizens.
Paul
www.opencouncil.org
Open
Here are some malpractice insurance statistics & statements that I have copied from an excellent article by David Stuart et al published in the New England Journal of Medicine (Volume 350(3),15 January 2004 pp 283-292):
... showed that the key predictor of payment was the plaintiff's degree of disability, not the presence of negligence
- 4.6 percent of hospitalizations involved an injury to the patient
- 0.8 percent (1 in 126 admissions) involved injuries that medicolegal experts thought would probably give rise to a finding of negligence in court
- only 2 percent of negligent injuries result in claims
- only 17 percent of claims appeared to involve a negligent injury
- a 10-year follow-up of the Harvard data from New York,
"The overall picture that emerges from these studies is disheartening. When all patients with negligent injuries are considered, not just those who manage to seek compensation as plaintiffs, the findings from the studies in California, in New York, and in Utah and Colorado are a searing indictment of the performance of the malpractice system. The data reveal a profoundly inaccurate mechanism for distributing compensation. It is also tremendously inefficient. Approximately 60 cents of every dollar expended on the system is absorbed by administrative costs (predominantly legal fees), an amount that is twice the overhead rate for an average workers' compensation scheme."
You want an insurance company just foot the bills, right?
Then think about hundreds of million people and their employers who will need to pay even more to
Even now medical insurance is not affordable (I pay about 200$/month, and it does not have dental that is usually covering some miniscule portions of dental bills), what will happen if sick get free reign?
I do not respect a system that does not have any accountability from these who use it (patients), and the Western medical system is pretty much like that. Eat crap, do not exercise, be fat, have a subconscious program of getting attention through getting sick - and these who exercise, eat helthy food, are fit and have a healthy psyche will pay for your endless source of pills, doctor visits and surgeries through their insurance premiums.
Yuk, and fuck them!
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
The ugliness of the situation for doctors is that when agreeing to work with a healthplan, they agree to a certain compensation schedule that can be done two ways - per procedures performed or capitation.
Whatever upkeeps his office has does not bother the insurance company. So, raising mlpractice premium hits the practice pretty hard.
As for bankrupcy, certain doctors close thier no longer profitable practice or at least stop providing services that carry heave premiums (such as delivering babies).
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
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.
http://sqft87.pisem.net/tiger/victim.html
And here is one of the culprits: http://sqft87.pisem.net/tiger/barbar.html
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
I think the greatest public relations con job has been the one put out by doctors and insurance companies that a) frivilous lawsuits are rampant and b) limiting them will help consumers.
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
On one hand, this is a good thing. I really don't like the kind of people that sue every chance they get. They are worse than the lawyers that represent them.
On the other hand, this could lead to bias. If a doctor that was rightfully sued entered the patient into his database, that would only do more harm (Hippocratic oath, anyone?)
Somewhere in the middle would be to have an independent organization that investigates the legal proceedings, and takes into account not only the verdict, but the evidence and whether it was won on a technicality, and then add to the database with supporting information.
That would be far less damaging, but also useful for the doctors that need it.
- malpractice, at least as defined by negligence, is fairly common
- of those with valid claims, only about 1% actually bring suit against a doctor
- of those who bring suit, only 1% are successful
This means that 1/100 of a percent of incidents of malpractice actually result in an award.
I just checked some of the numbers from NEJM myself. For the most part you are correct, but you have to be careful mixing and matching numbers from other studies.
From part I of the study:
Adverse events occurred in 3.7 percent of the hospitalizations (95 percent confidence interval, 3.2 to 4.2), and 27.6 percent of the adverse events were due to negligence (95 percent confidence interval, 22.5 to 32.6).
So if you multiply 3.7% with 27.6% you get 1.02% of all hospitalizations resulting in adverse effects that were actually due to negligence, the other 99% of adverse effects were due to something other than negligence out of control by the physician. So back to your comment, I don't see how 1% malpractice due to negligence is "fairly common," but that's a glass half-full argument, so I'll give it to you -- many people will still see 1% as "fairly common," after all, physicians see many patients and at a pure numbers standpoint 1% of all patients is a lot.
Part III of the NEJM study said:
Of the 280 patients who had adverse events caused by medical negligence as defined by the study protocol, 8 filed malpractice claims (weighted rate, 1.53 percent; 95 percent confidence interval, 0 to 3.2 percent).
So that means that (1.53% times 1%) 0.0153% actually lead to malpractice claims due to negligence. Ok, so the 1.53% backs your second point, but my contention is with your third point: - of those who bring suit, only 1% are successful. I don't see those numbers anywhere in the NEJM study (granted, I only read the abstracts and not the entirety of the papers), so I can only assume you got the figure in your third point from yet another study. There is no mention whether or not that number came from cases that truly stemmed from incidents of negligence. After all you could still have say 100 cases, all of them frivolous (i.e. not a result of negligence), and still 1 successful out of them and get 1% success rate.
Linux at home
First off I didn't say "1/100" as in 1 out of 100. I said 1/100th. That's 0.01% of the total number of valid malpractice claims in the United States annually. And note that its VALID claims, not someone making up an injury to rip off a doctor for insurance money. Someone was ACTUALLY WRONGED by the Doctor when the case was reviewed.
As for the rest, RTFA. The vast majority of those wins aren't multi-million dollar lawsuits. The huge penalties you hear about are the VAST minority of cases, and usually invovle some gross negligence. In fact, most of teh jury awards you ehar about aren't medical at all, they relate to normal civil suits or class-action lawsuits for envoronmental stuff, product defects, etc.
You want to know what most civil cases are? Most cases are like what happened to my sister. She went to a reputable film studio in DC to have a sample tape made. It cost her a couple grand and she headed down for an end of week trip to do it. The guy making it was an idiot, hired some moron to mange the lighting, and this guy (who was an illegal immigrant, I kid you not) put a high power UV light feet from her faces. Thinking they knew what they were doing my sister just suffered through the episode, which went on for like an hour.
Fast forward a couple hours and my sisters entire face, cornea, etc. suffered second degree burns. She was, in essence, totally blind in a strange city where she had NO idea what to do. The studio did NOTHING but send her on her way after giving her a couple of phone calls; no offer of help, no offer to take care of her etc. After a long ordeal that involved my cousins driving an hour to get her and my mother flying in to GUIDE her out she filed a lawsuit against the incompetant bastards. Know what she got for near permanent damage to her sight? $8k.
Don't talk to me about giant settlements man, it just doesn't happen. The media has dont the US public a huge disservice by propogatingt the facade that juries are handing out massive awards to any schmo that comes into court with a cut on his finger.
-rt
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 just turned 21, and my insurance got cut in half. I was paying $280 a month, $70 MORE than my truck note! Every year it would go up, and I've never been in a work. From what I have learned, if the Insurance companies make $3mill one year, and $2mill the next, they call is a $1mill loss. From what I've gathered thus far, insurance isn't regulated and needs to be, how to do it... I don't know. I live in Texas, and it appears more and more people are driving without insurance becuase they can't afford it. Hell, I'm tempted myself to drop it. I'm almost willing to take the chance and get fined (which is _still_ less) for driving without insurance. Sadly, because I have a loan I can not cut insurance, I must have full coverage. If I go to other insurance companies, I've heard of horrors of them not paying or taking forever or some crap. It's a trap, a trap I say! :-)
My point is, we are all in the same field, except only the docters have the denero to fight it.
"Do or do not. There is no try." -- Master Yoda (Half man, half muppet)
I've read so many posts on this thread blaming the evil lawyers for causing this problem. Let me break it to you, people. If the doctors weren't making mistakes and hurting people, there wouldn't be any medical malpractice lawyers.
Doctors are losing lawsuits because so many people in the jury pool know someone personally who has endured a medical error. In my family, I know of at least two. My great grandmother got a peritoneal infection because doctors left her abdomen packed with gauze after operating on her intestines. My mother was allergic to codeine, she advised her doctor of this, when the pain from cancer was too much for her to take, she asked for a pain releiver. This doctor went on to proscribe a pain reliever to her that contained codeine.
Neither my mother nor my great grandmother sued. I would have. If that means that I'd end up on some "list" for being a "troublemaker" so be it. In the end I bet I'd get better treatment because the doctors know that if they don't cross every "t" and dot every "i", I'm going to complaing. If a lack of awareness on their part causes me harm, they'll find themselves in court.
You want to fix this problem? Make it easier to revoke the medical licenses of doctors who are hurting people.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
It depends on whether or not he followed procedure, and wether or not he knew better. For example, you might have heard about this case, where a girl died after a transplant because the doctor forgot to check to see that the organs were of the right blood type. Yes he's a nice guy, yes he's been a great doctor, but this was still an inexcusable mistake that cost a young girl her life.
Its the job of the lawyers, the expert witnesses, the judge, and the jury to determine wether the act was a simple mistake or oversight, or if it was a case of gross incompetence or negligence. If, for some reason, the judge and the defense attorneys are asleep at the wheel and the case really is without merit, it will be shot down on appeal.
... we need to play fair.
If scores of good doctors should not pay for a bad one through insurance, scores of halthy people should not pay for the sick ones through insurance.
Make health insurance illegal, and let everyone pay out of pocket. This way these who are seriously sick will die off quickly, and the population as a wholee will become healthier. It will be a better system than one we have today.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
It's not "okay," but it's also inevitable that mistakes will be made. Our society is increasingly headed to the state where everyone is paralyzed and unable to act out of the fear they might make a mistake.
Ban the problem doctors, as only a few are the source of most of the legitimate claims, from practicing medicine anywhere in the United States. Or at least severly restict what they can do. The article mentioned one bad doctor: he was addicted to painkillers, sewed up a surgical sponge inside a patient, operated on the wrong hip and amputated the wrong leg. But I wonder if the insurance industry doesn't keep these guys around, because it gives then an excuse to raise the rates on all doctors.
Does it distinguish doctors by specialization?
Certain fields (neurosurgery, ob/gyn) have much more chances that something goes wrong, much more chances of death and much more chances of a lawsuit.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Some people here need to get a life and grow up ...
:
... the list is endless and often not in the best interest of the patient.
...sorry ""
...even in cases where you prove that you did not cause the bad result or that the case against you is anatomically impossible! Furthermore the insurance company can settle a case without the consent of the doctor in question! Furthermore consider that maybe that doctor is in a speciality or location that increases the odds...if your are the only one of five neurosurgeon who a whole city then they are going to sued...alot
Facts
1.) FYI there already is at least one national DB that can be searched on individual practitioners ( not just doctors)
http://sra.com/services/index.asp?id=186
2.) It costs NOTHING to file a suit yet it costs thousands to defend against one
3.) Doctors are often held to an IMPOSSIBLE inhuman standard. i.e. "You may not make any mistakes"....anyone here want to held to this standard in their daily activities ? This directly contributes to high health care costs thru unnecessary tests to rule out everything to 5 nines (assuming the HMO will even let them get to 2 nines. see below)
4.) Think HMOs don't dictate to doctors ? your WRONG...HMOs dictate everything from methods of care , drugs
5.) Think that HMOs keep cost down ?Ever wonder how this is done? In part its done by paying MDs irrespectively of the cost of the service they provide ! "" Doctor we know is costs you $50 to take an X-ray but we are only going to pay you $20...Oh that doesn't even cover the cost of the FILM
6.) I noticed people making the following assumption:
"Doctor X has been sued Y times therefore he is a bad doctor."
Bull S***...You can be sued and LOSE for anything
7.) " why don't doctors band together to try and restore some equity in prices and compensation ?"
Because they can't ! a little thing called the RICO act has been used against doctors who do this ! Even doctors in the same practice ! But there is nothing against insurance company X calling insurance company Y and coordinating the price they pay the doctor for his services.
I am not even suggesting that all doctors are perfect in fact NONE are !! I am not suggesting there are no doctors that do bad things...they exist but no where near the level of the lawsuits out there
Look around people there is a shortage of doctors and its getting worse..doctors are retiring in their prime not only denying their skill to the public but also their knowledge and experience to future doctors...if everything was all good and this whole lawsuit/HMO thing was blown out of proportion do you really think that this would be happening?
I have been in health care for most of my life and am a 3rd year medical student. I have been to MANY malpractice trials and have never seen any case where the the case was a just one.
medicine is not an exact science. there are huge gaps in what we know and what we don't. very little is empirical.
Compare medicine with trouble shooting a flaky memory module. some times you get it on the first pass...other times its the last thing you find...now imagine you can be sued for NOT finding it in the first pass...
" But people are not memory " some whine...."if doctors get is wrong it hurts "...Look even if doctors get it right is can still hurt !
Furthermore people are more complicated then computers and have very few hot swappable parts...and can send mixed messages that make the "blue screen of death" look like a detailed sheet of what's wrong!!
later
Andrew
American society more and more loses so called paternalistic model based on relationship between a Teacher and student who wants to learn (or parent and son). What is coming is the "provider" model when all others do is provide a service. It makes the receiving end a customer (or even consumer) and gives him ability to demand quality and customer satisfaction from the provider, but something is lost in transaction. This "something" is a human relationship. No, they certainly keep smiling at you, but this smile is often just a socially required grimace, the mask.
You can't have both ability to sue the provider for damages and be his friend. The whole concept of "Nothing personal, it's just business" serves as a good deterrent on these patrnalistically inclined providers of the service.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Funny how Americans only care about massacres and dictators in countries that have OIL or other useful resources. Yugoslavia would have been irrelevant if not for it's oil pipelines. Iraq? Any idiot knew that war was just about oil. If the US had cared about those millions of people, they wouldn't have armed Saddam in the first place.
I'm up for jury duty later this month.
Time for some experimentation with the system....
BTW, you're sort of right -- except that if you are smart enough to know what's going on in jury selection it's not terribly hard to either get out, OR get in, unless you have to admit that yes, you do have that doctorate in rocket science.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20040307
"This food is problematic."
I've frequently had to debunk the McDonalds coffee legend myself. Funny how its a good example of why we need lawyers and big awards, rather than an example of a frivilous lawsuit.
She. Was. Burned. To. The. Bone. $300,000 in surgery and skin grafts. Why don't you go boil a pot of water on your stove, then dump it on yourself. Then come back here and tell us it isn't serious.
You shouldn't have to worry about getting 3rd degree burns when you go out to a restaurant, anymore than you should worry about your gas tank exploding if you get into an accident at 5 mph.
She didn't sue because she dumped coffee on herself. And she didn't sue because the spilled coffee burned her to the bone. She sued because McDonalds was aware of the problem, and blew her off along with hundereds of other complaints from customers and health inspectors.
"Nice to know that you can get blacklisted for suing the doctor that caused massive brain damage to your kid"
first off, you don't know what it's like to be the son of a doctor who has had 5 lawsuits on his back, winning every one but the last one.
you believe that doctors don't try, or that they should be held liable for everything?
my father who is the head of ENT Services (Otolaryngology) at his hospital(will not say where for discretion), has had lawsuits from people who have had a history of complaints or lawsuits against other doctors.
let me tell you a story about the previous person who sued my father and won.
the plaintiff had a history of suing previous doctors. this man was suing my father blaming the death of his wife on my father.
poor guy right? wrong.
his wife had 4 various opinions from other doctors over the course of a year, in which increased her cancer tremendously and which eventually caused her death. having second opinions is fine and comes natural, but doing it and constantly delaying the removal of the cancer was obvious her mistake.
she had died, but now her husband, 6 years later, is now suing my father and had put the guilt on him and the jury by bringing in family members, and not using medical history records as supplemental proof.
doctors have a right to be protected, and they absolutely should be.
if you knew that your father was suicidal too because of these stupid cases over some monetary value, only to find out that the plaintiff has had 3 previous marriages and a history of alcoholic problems, then come back here and say that doctors don't have that right.
seeing this kind of view against doctors makes me sick now.
the law practically allows people to sue doctors at will. so before you put any blame against doctors, think about both sides of the argument.
I've worked in the US as an ER doc and I've worked overseas as an ER doc. Posted below is someone who believes that health care is better overseas. S/he is wrong. The health care in the US is much (even wildly) better when it comes to critical care and acute illness. When it comes to preventive care, overseas can be better, if they have the money.
As far as the ability to sue, doctors aren't judged by by a jury of peers. Trying to explain complicated biological concepts to a jury that has been hand picked for ignorance by the plantiff's lawyer makes a fair trial unlikely. That's why everyone is moving out of south texas. The jury is of the patient's peers, not the doctors. No one cares about guilt, innocence or jusitice. They just care about the pay out from the insurance company.
As an aside, I'm quitting medicine, and no, i've never been sued. But between no reimbursement for my services, ridiculous risk of malpractice suits and the generally absurb expectations of patients, I've given up.
I'm a med student at a big teaching hospital in the midwest, about a month away from graduating. The malpractice situation has gotten so bad that it drives everything the doctors do, and our lives revolve around it.
I routinely get patients who tell me quite openly that they hope I, or someone else on the team, makes a mistake so that they "can get a piece of the jackpot". There are patients who come in faking symptoms because they want to get treated, or operated upon, and then sue in the hope of getting a settlement. This works because it's more expensive for a hospital or physician group to prosecute a lawsuit than to just settle up front.
Any time the slightest hint of trouble emerges, we docs have to throw everything we've got at it, without regard for probability or even common sense. Almost any new headache requires a CT scan of the head. Almost any new shortness of breath requires ultrasound imaging of the lower extremities and possibly a CT of the chest. We spend absolute fortunes on tests, procedures, and labs for people whom we know probably don't have something wrong--but we can't take the chance of missing anything, because then we'll get sued, even if we make the statistically appropriate choice.
A certain number of babies will be born every year that are not in perfect health. That's evolution at work. A certain number of people will get sick and die every year. That's the natural course of the human body. These common-sense facts are ignored by malpractice lawyers and their clients, whose greed compels them to place all blame in the world on the shoulders of doctors--and by society at large, which allows this insane situation to persist.
In the meantime, if you are wondering why you pay so much for health care--that's why. Because if we don't throw the kitchen sink at every situation, we'll get sued. (Of course, we'll get sued eventually anyway, but at least we can reduce the frequency of lawsuits by practicing defensive--i.e. expensive--medicine.)
The system you've described does exist. Once evidence has been presented early on in litigation, the defendant can, on the basis of plaintiff's witnesses, ask the court to throw out the lawsuit on grounds that, e.g., the law doesn't provide that somebody can sue for that, or that it's clear from plaintiff's evidence that he doesn't have a case. It's called 'summary judgment', and it very much does reduce frivolous lawsuits of all kinds.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Yes people dont help the fact that SUPERBUGS by not finishing thier antibiotics but it is not just ttier fault.
The insurance companies are also to blam as well as they now recomend that a course of 5 days of drugs is good to fix an infection. When it has been proved time and time again that they should be taken for at least 7 days. Yet the insurance companies make more money so what do they care?
700 in 10 years. Thays 70 per year. Spread over how many THOUSAND locations??
...the jury found Liebeck 20 percent at fault in the spill....
Don't you know anything about marketing? Like how every responce represents about a thousand people, because most don't bother to write in? Besides, not all of those complaints were from customers: health inspectors complained as well. McDonalds blew them off too.
A spokesman for the National Coffee Association says McDonald's coffee conforms to industry temperature standards.
Perhapse you should have done some more Googling. McDonalds routinely kept their coffee 40 degrees hotter than other restaurants.
Coffee...Hot? DUUUUUUUHHH, I don't know.
Its quite possible to have coffee hot enough to enjoy without having it so hot as to cause third degree burns. Why are people who like near boiling coffee able to drink it without burning themselves? Because they sip it. If they were to chug it all at once, they could say goodbye to the lining on their esophaguses. But if it comes down to these people getting their 190 degree coffee, or me being safe from having my skin melted off, they can take their coffee and shove it up their asses.
she may have contributed to her injuries by holding the cup between her legs and not removing her clothing immediately
And how fast can you take off your pants while being seated in a car? Especially if you are buckeled in?
Well duh, because she was the one who actually spilled it. But McDonalds were the ones who were selling a dangerous product, so they were found to be 80% at fault.
should be per se proof that it was serving its coffee at a temperature that consumers desired, rather than "too hot."
No, they kept it that hot to save money, not because customers demanded it.
Look, why the hell should any food product thats meant to be immediatly served and consumed run the risk of causing you serious injury?
If you want to get technical, you add the milk to the espresso. And I'm fairly confident that the milk is hotter, having been burnt by both. The finished drink should be at a minimum of 170 degrees after you are done fiddling with syrups and toppings and shit, so the milk needs to be around 190, especially if you are doing a caramel macchiato or some similarly syrup laden beverage. Soy milk is an exception as it burns more readily than regular milk - do not order soy mochas with flavored syrups as the temperature required of the soy to melt the syrup produces a lovely burnt flavor nauseatingly masked by all the sugar.
Sure, the water in the espresso machine is scalding, and the espresso dripping from it is pretty hot too. But in the little cup that catches it, it cools very quickly. This is why the milk must be added to it as soon as possible. The end beverage product will vary from 160 to 180ish, with somewhere around 175 being a nice ideal. When you are making 5 drinks in a little under two minutes, for an hour and a half straight, this is hard to achieve in practice. Other complications involve children's beverages, which are served at much lower heat (usu. 140 max) and beverages served at higher heat, such as hot apple cider and americanos.
An americano is what you get when you add 190 degree water to espresso. It is the Italian approximation of American coffee.
As I have been employed at a McDonald's franchise after the disputed, I will simply say that if they lowered the hold temperature of the coffee then it was a damn good thing they did so, as it was at least 185 degrees at "my" store in CA. The water used to make the coffee was abominably hot. We had to use it to make hot tea for people. The teabags come in a paper wrapper with golden arches on them, so I was never tempted to try the tea. The water itself was comfortably above boiling. It burnt me worse than the fry oil ever did.
Coffee has a higher boiling point than plain old water, which means that you may not necessarily be aware that what you think is hot coffee is actually a nuclear furnace in an insulated bunker.
I will go far as to say that I believe that if the woman in question was burnt as badly as she claims and McDonald's would not cover her hospital bills and she sued McD for the purposes of paying her medical expenses, then her lawsuit was not frivolous, given my bias that nobody should be peddling a substance capable of that level of tissue damage for the specific purpose of ingestion into one's vulnerable oral orifice.
Twist Tricks,
Arek Rashan
http://www.tortreform.com/show_article.asp?article ID=201
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http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metrop
http://www.tortreform.com/show_article.asp?arti
http://www.tortreform.com/show_article.asp?arti
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
I recall reading a study that showed that Doctors with good bedside manner received far fewer malpractice suits from their patients than those with poor social skills. I apologize for not providing a link.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
primarily merit based, and almost all the big schools participate.
And the thing is he didn't really need the assistance, but he won it anyway, and that must mean something, because they just don't give those things away.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
The fact of the action is a matter of public record, and the court record is, for the most part, available for public review except where the Court seals it. I have never seen the court seal a consent decree, although it may happen, but it still would not make private the complaint and most other court pleadings. While the terms of settlement may be confidential (and disclosing them contrary to provisions may well be a breach of that agreement), the fact of the action is not somehow hidden therefore.
If your model of doctors is that they make mistakes 1/3 of the time (regardless of whether it's a simple diagnosis or complex surgery), you're going to be able to deal with them much more rationally and live longer. Doctors aren't any smarter than programmers or lawyers or politicians or interior designers. If anything, they have less quality control, testing, and supervision in place. And the system they deal with (the human body) is even less well understood than software, the law, politics, or interior design. So, look around at software, the legal system, politics, and interior design and ask yourself: do I want similar kinds of "experts" working on me?
So, when considering medical treatments, think about: does this treatment have the potential of doing me serious harm? Do I absolutely need this treatment? Should I get a second (and third) opinion? Is a 1/3 risk of the kind of mistake that can happen during this treatment/procedure worth the potential benefits?
Also keep in mind that most problems, doctors can't do much about anyway. Our increase in life expectancy actually comes almost exclusively from improvements in public health, not medical care. Which makes it all the more bizarre that we are spending such silly amounts on medical care.
Sorry, I'm not buying the story about the kid who didn't get into college suing the doctor for causing brain damage. When, where, before what judge, and names of the parties, please?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
As an AC mentioned, I don't think they were a horrible people, but there was a lot of mutual animosity between them and the Jews. There had been a recent incident involving defacing a temple, and so Jews were actually praying that Samaritans would not get eternal life. You can read the parable itself at Luke 10:30 and a good analysis here. It mentions why the priest and Levite were reluctant to help, and why the Samaritan would be as well. Yet of course the despised Samaritan does what the others would not.
I'm an atheist, but I like this parable. And it seems that most people neither understand the historical details nor understand that they can be the good Samaritan in their daily lives.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You mention the BAR but lets face it lawyers have it easy. Lawyers are just as loathe to punish other lawyers as doctors are, even more so. How many lawyers actually get disbarred? How many get sued for malpractice? When a lawyer loses a case, he loses a case and possibly loses the client to someone else. When a doctor loses a case he has a good chance of being sued for malpractice. If lawyers had to be as perfectly successful as doctors then insurance for lawyers would be skyrocketing out of control too. Doctors dont get decertified because of malpractice cases because if your doctor has never been sued then he probably has not been practicing very long. An OBGYN is lucky if he goes 5 years without his insurance company having to pay out a settlement or a sizeable verdict cause he gets a 15% break on his premiums. Not many doctors in high risk specialties get such a clean record.
Aah but the stats don't tell the whole story. For one thing medical malpractice is too broadly defined. It is not an exact science, there is an element of risk, chance etc. Even in science nothing is ever absolutely for certain. Sometimes things go badly, 99.99999999999% of the time, the doctors involved did their best. My father has been sued successfully by patients and the vast majority of his patients adore him. I can hardly walk down the street without running into someone who recognizes me as his son and tells me how good he is. But he has been sued all the same. Some people are just complainers and they always want to blame someone else and get some easy money.
A good example is how one woman sued him because she lost a pregnancy because she was diabetic and did not take care of herself. She was a nurse, a medical professional, who literally refused to stop smoking and drinking and control her diabetes and she still won. Why? Because juries and judges are not medical professionals, they don't understand these cases, all they understand is that someone got hurt and they need money to pay their bills and stuff and the doctor has this big insurance company behind him that can hand out a million dollars like its toilet paper. So they side with the plaintiff out of sympathy. And punitive damages are very uncommon in malpractice but it does not matter cause the economic damages alone are often a million dollars because the cost of lifetime care for a person who was injured permanently is so high.
While doctors have every right to gather this sort of data and make it available (and I can see why they would want to, for self-defence reasons in a highly vexatious country like the US), the DPA gives the people in the database some key rights, such as the right to have inaccurate information corrected or removed, and some ability to prevent automated decision making being bade on your data.
Sure, you can always build a database such as this, but in the EU, you have to do it in a responsible manner. Unless you're the government of course :)
She sued because she was harmed and McDonalds would not cover the medical bills. The punitive damages were because McDonalds knew of the problem and blew her off along with hundreds of other complaints.
Fight Spammers!
...for being human.
Know any med or law students? These kids are just like everyone else. And when I say "everyone else" I mean utterly and completely fallable. I know people that will become doctors who you would never want treating you or your family. And everyone knows that lawyers can be jerks.
The solution isn't to stop people from suing AFTER screwups happen. It's about controlling who becomes doctors and lawyers. Both professions reward academics over anything else (obviously medicine more than law). I strongly believe -contrary to popular belief- that a lot of people are smart enough to do both jobs. Instead of seeing who is the smartest of the smart-enough group, we should weed out the people who lack ethical, social, or other skills that are also very pertinent to these two professions.
Also, so many young people become doctors or lawyers because it's "respectable" to do so and because the professions bring a lot of money in. Maybe decreasing wages in these professions will bring out people who are genuinely interested in helping people (there are still some but they are the minority in my experience).
If we are more selective with our students (and I do not mean grades), we will get less doctors who make (big inexcusable) mistakes and less lawyers who are willing to sell their soul at the prospect of a million-dollar settlement.
My landlord's a lawyer.
Breakfast served all day!
I see several posts for people defending Doctor's on this board. Doctors lose lawsuits where they did nothing wrong. Patients sue every chance they get. Doctors will make mistakes, get used to it... blah blah blah.
Malpractice lawsuits would not be so lucrative if there were not egregious errors being made. Have you heard of Doctors amputating the wrong limbs? Have you heard of Doctors prescribing medication that patients were alergic to? My own wife's OB prescribed her BIRTH CONTROL accidentally when she was 5 months pregnant! (Thank goodness I asked the pharmacist for instructions when I picked up her perscription!)
Doctors make mistakes, yes. Many Doctors get sued for small mistakes that cause little harm, yes. But there is no clear place to draw the line. When I deploy software, we go through every possible scenario to insure a smooth deployment. We even further our efforts when it's a key deployment either for a large amount of end users, for an important end user community, or for a big dollar client we're afraid of pissing off. When you are dealing with human life, similar efforts should be made. When you prescribe potentially lethal medication, a certain amount of double checking is in order. When you have a patient cut open, it stands to reason that you will count your instruments before and after the procedure to make sure nothing is left inside. It stands to reason that you would check the open body cavity for any contaminants before re-sealing it. Doctors become complacent in their day to day jobs and that simply is not acceptable. The only thing to keep them in check is the potential of a malpractice lawsuit.
Frankly, I'd rather be on the list then off of it. At least then, I would be sure that a certain amount of effort would be made to ensure that I would not sue.
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
Simple solution... do what (I hear) they do in England. If you sue someone, and lose, then you pay for their legal fees. It is because of this that so many cases settle. If someone sues you for 25k, it'll cost you 15K for a lawyer, so you're pushed into a 7.5k settlement. Even if you win, you're 15k down (then you have to pay a lawyer to sue for legal expenses yet again...)
If there's a serious problem, and there obviously is here, it's always worth looking at other countries and see
a) if it's a problem there
b) why
c) how they avoid it
d) how they solve it
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
So, where in the constitution does it say everyone has a right to force doctors to treat them? Is it right under the line that says that doctors have no rights and must be forced to use their 6+ years of intensive training whenever anyone asks, even if that person is doctor shopping or has a history of multiple lawsuits?
Exactly who's "rights" does this database infringe upon? How is it any different than similiar databases set up in states like New York that list all doctors, their certifications, where they trained, and if they've been sued or not? Oh yea, THAT's OK, because it's easy to shit on doctors because we can always sue them if they gripe about it.
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"
First, you manage to put in place one of the strongest medical academic infrastructures on earth, with some of the best doctors around.
Then you develop this attitude where nobody cares about damn anything except for himself, his privacy and his own pocket. As mentalities break barriers of race, religion, neighborhood or whatever else, doctors, pharmacists, nurses and other medical staff are not immune.
Then you give a whole new meaning to the word "Sue" by building a whole industry around suing sidewalk engineers after you slipped on a bannana. A law industry that promptly regards the end-user's responsibility, whatever the case may be as sheer ZERO.
On top of that, you build a bizzare insurance industry that capitalizes on 2 things:
1. Punishing the MAJORITY of the doctors for the stupid mistakes that those [few] who don't give a damn, are stupid, or are just plain human do.
2. Punishing the MAJORITY of the public for the greedy, senseless, I-did-something-stupid-so-gimme-yer-money-lawsuit filing assholes.
If you polarize the world enough, you'd have two very extreme possibilities:
1. You will have doctors that make mistakes but mostly do their job and make your life better
or
2. Unless you're so rich you don't bother counting smaller-than-5-figures-sums-of-money, you have either very expensive or very inexperienced doctors at your disposal, which make just SLIGHTLY LESS mistakes, and which pay you (probbably less than you overpay in the first place) if they DO make a mistake.
So collectively (by not using your electoral power to limit the damage which both dope-smoking-doctors and trigger-happy-lawsuiters can do), you're kicking your best doctors, your healthcare and your own tax-paying public [read: yourself] in the teeth, in the name of those who got hurt by one of the aforementioned parties for the benefit of some lawyers and insurance agents.
I'm not anti-American, I really respect America for its good sides, but as an outsider, I'm looking at how you all collectively screw each other over, and as objective as I can or cannot be, you're dumb.
-
"A politician who proposed leveling SS taxes would get my vote immediately and without reservation."
In order for this to be fair, we'd have to level out what "richer" people get out of social security. My grandfather, for example (whose the classic rags to riches story), cannot survive on what he gets from social security. Even though he paid a lower percentage of his total income than poorer people did, he gets a lower percentage of his total income now than they do. If you want to argue that everyone should pay equal amounts of their wealth to SS then everyone should get equal amounts of their "yearly retirement money" from SS, which would drop the system to shit.
Secondly, " baffles me is that people keep voting for government by, of, and for millionares...". Any idea how much money the top 1% actually makes? Compared with the overall average family income of $51,300, the top 1% of all families averaged $295,300. That hardly sounds like a millionaire to me. Not even close in fact. And furthermore, most of that income comes from employment (not INHERITED money invested somewhere). Lastly, a million dollars is NOT very much to live on alone (this does not mean 1mil / year). A million dollars at 6% interest (which is rather difficult to get risk-free) is only $60,000 a year (slightly above the national average). Earning the historical average for the stock market, it'd get around $90,000-$100,000 after being adjusted for inflation. Yes this is more than the national average, but it's not an insane amount more. It wouldn't even put the person in the top 1%.
In regards to seeing one person in the federal government in the lower 70%, I'm going to generalize for a second. Many decisions the government has to make, require a substantial amount of knowlegde/education to be made well. Now I'm not arguing that the government does this but economic matters for instance, are extremely complicated. There is a correlation between income and education (else why pay for higher education). I'd be interested to know how many people in the lower 70% have 4-year degrees from well-known and respected institutions. I, personally, have no desire to see an un-educated person in government simply to represent the "lower 70%".
Random tax cut comment: The top 1% pays about 10 times more in income tax than the bottom 50%. Those of you who felt the tax cut should've gone to the poor, there's not much to cut and give back. There's a lot more to give back to those who paid the taxes.
Geez, chill. It's just some doctors fighting back against the criminally insane legal system.
You know, some people would prefer to spend more time actually doing the line of work they chose than in court. Doctors are among the most-often sued professionals, and the majority of cases don't have anything even resembling credibility.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
There was a bit of a brouhaha about this a while ago, when patients got the right to see their own records.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
If you want to get technical, you add the milk to the espresso.
l e ID=27
This is the most common way of making a milk-based espresso drink, but it can be done either way.
And I'm fairly confident that the milk is hotter, having been burnt by both. The finished drink should be at a minimum of 170 degrees after you are done fiddling with syrups and toppings and shit, so the milk needs to be around 190
It does if you want scalded milk and crap foam. Most barista who have a clue though, will be aiming for their milk to finish steaming at 160 - 165, while the temperature at which an espresso shot is pulled should be around 190 - 204.
The temperature of the drink is maintained by pre-warming the cup. See:
http://www.danny.mcnulty.btinternet.co.uk/faq.htm
http://www.coffeegeek.com/guides/frothingguide
http://www.wholelattelove.com/articles.cfm?articl
"There has to be some kind of plausable reason for something as dumb as this being victorious."
Maybe because the parent poster is lying. I mean, the statute of limitations on the tort probably already expired. (The kid's eighteen, after all.) The parent poster can reply with name of the case.
This isn't flamebait. I'm just annoyed at people who make quick, uninformed judgments. Normally, medical malpractice cases are extremely difficult to vindicate because the average jury, who just like you, hates malpractice lawyers, has to find by a clear preponderance of the evidence that something wrong happened. To convince a jury of this requires expensive medical expert testimony that is rebutted by the other side. The plaintiff has the burden of persuasion just like the prosecution in a criminal case.
Findings of guilt usually doesn't happen unless the doctor does something blantantly wrong and against medical protocol, such as leaving an instrument behind, amputating the wrong leg, or twisting a baby's head with forceps. Everything else is just too hard for a jury to understand and find guilt on.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
thinking that the point of being a lawyer was to misunderstand statistics and to not realise that a implies b does not mean that b implies a. Or maybe I watch too many films/news programs about lawyers and not enough of the real thing.
Bone is pressure sensitive, and it's highly unlikely that your doctor did anything wrong.
..........FULL STOP.
If they were sued, then its only restating facts.
If the doctor mistreated a patient, or gave poor service its only restating facts.
It's not slander if its true. ( yes im making that assumption here )
Actually we have several entities that report bad service in my area online.. They include 'professional' trades too.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If you ask nicely, the parent poster might give details of this rare zebra cancer...
That person in Florida who had the "wrong" leg amputated, needed BOTH legs amputated for infection/gangrene. The surgeons didn't want to do both in one operation (too much surgery for the guy), so they arbitrarily scheduled one leg first. The media just made it's own news again as usual.
Neonates have weird immune systems that aren't fully developed - it's much easier to make this mistake with them.
People routinely die from vaccines! Would you rather have 3-5 people die per year from polio vaccines, or have 10,000 children crippled and 3000-5000 die per year from polio related lung failures. Mercury containing preservatives are quite common(contact lens solution, etc) - it just sounds bad to uneducated ears.
I haven't heard of the anesthesiologist/coke story, but that action would result in loss of license and very likely jail time. However, I know of NO surgeon who would let the anesthesiologist leave the room in the middle of a case - it doesn't happen
..........FULL STOP.
Right now all the talk is in defense of doctors and protecting them and their insurance companies from lawsuits. The sad fact of the matter is that people die from malpractice every day and some of it borders on criminial negligance. Most of those doctors' insurance companies settle the case and they keep practicing medicine.
In certain instances of gross incompetence or lying to the family, these quacks should serve jail time.
I'm a surgeon, and I hapened to ask my graduating medschool class (this was 7 years ago) what they would do if they won the lottery. About 90% said they would continue to practice medicine, only 2 guys said they would quit medicine. I don't think my school is an anomaly either
As far as the NYC doctor strike in the 1970s. All the sick people went elsewhere (NJ, Conn, etc), so of course if you remove the sick people the death rate will go down.
..........FULL STOP.
The title made me think this article was about SCO
... if the contract would say I can't be kicked for that reason.
If the contract allowed for that I would do nothing and fullfil my part of the bargain, vacating asap and finding a new place.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
"...it was more profitable to loose an eye and a foot than to just outright die."
I don't find that very surprising as your relatives steal all your money upon death. Corpses are probably one of the most discriminated minorities(?).
Any material capable of causing 3rd degree burns is not fit for human cunsumption, it is not even fit for casual handling.
That so many idiots like you do not understand this frankly makes one lose faith on humanity.
Your cofee can be perfectly warm without being a public hazard.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Fascinating reading the threads here. Threads saying: - lawyers are greedy. - doctors are greedy. - people in accidents are greedy. - insurance companies are greedy. Most likely, there are lots of greedy and good people from all groups. The US needs to work on all of them, not blame one group. Establish some common sense laws about doctor's culpability. Establish penalties and court-cost rules to discourage frivolous lawsuits while offering small help to genuine cases. etc........
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
They were selling a product that was a public hazard.
Don't spill is completely idiotic because people were not given the correct information.
If people would have been told "This coffee can cause 3rd degree burns, drink at your own risk" then yes, you would be right, do not spill the dman thing, you know it is going to hurt.
But any person buying something to drink should have the expectiation tha the product, no matter how carlessly is handled, will not land you in the hospital requiring skin grafts and complex surgery.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You think it is reasonable to expect that nobody, ever, will spill the liquid.
Since I don't assume the above, which in my book is completely ridiculous to even entertain, then, if I am responsible, and have been told 700 times before that it is really fucking hot, then I would do something about it.
Like reduce the temperature.
But no, customers that did not have the correct information to make appropriate choices (the information missing was that "This drink ca cause 3rd degree burns"), thus the company is clearly negligent.
Nobody with a modicum of common sense should expect to spend weeks in hospital for spilling a hot beverage. That is utterly and completely unreasonable.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The Doctors need to protect themeselves somehow. it's a pretty lame solution but until the Lawyers and Insurance companies get slapped upside the head with some sensible legislation I can see why the doctors feel they need to take some sort of measures. The loosers should always have to pay the court costs. And the insurance companies need to stop setting bogus claims because litigation is so spendy. The reason there are so many false and exaggurated claims in the first place is because these insurance companies settle iffy claims so frequently. That needs to be fixed.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
EXCELLENT POST
Wish I had mod points.
My wife's OBGYN is about to quit the practice as he must deliver a baby nearly every day of the year just to make enough money to pay his Medical Malpractice insurance bill.
Malpractice suits are a true problem for physicians. Since there is no downside to filing a suit (attorneys don't charge unless they win) there is no reason not to sue. Also only about 20% of malpractice cases are won by the plantiff. (If that were the case in medicine, you doctor could be correct only 20% of the time, this would be unacceptable.)Something needs to be done about this. Would you rather have your money go to pay for healthcare or go to laywers?
I'm not certain of the purpose of the database of plantiffs. Its best use appears to highlight how useless such databases are. Everyone seems fine that there is a database on physicians who are sued, eventhough the physician may have won every case in the database. A doctor in a high risk specialty my be sued frequently due to bad outcomes eventhough they do everything correctly. Either database (physician or plantiff) is probably equally meaningless.
Pharmacists are medical professionals. They are supposed to do more than take the pills out of the big bottle and put them in the little bottle. I'm not saying that they should be sued for every mistake, but they do have a responsibility to ensure that the prescription is reasonable and that it is filled correctly. Doctors often make mistakes in writing prescriptions, they are not experts on drugs and their interactions. If there is a question, the pharmacist should talk to the doctor and resolve the problem. Putting the proper drug, at the proper dosage, with understandable instructions, in the bottle is an important part of their job.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Judge rules for developer who refused to sell home to attorney
I wish I remembered which 60-minutes-style show this was on, but you have to be very careful if you win a settlement that you don't end up worse off than you were before.
The show had an example of a woman who won like $750,000 from some big company. I don't remember what the lawsuit was about but I seem to remember that $750,000 seemed just. Anyway, her lawyer's bill was something like $600,000 leaving her with approx $150,000, but she had to pay taxes on the full $750,000 which left her owing the IRS about $60,000. ( These numbers here are murkily-remembered *ballpark* values )
Does anyone know if you can have the court order that the defendant pay up in 2 seperate checks, one to the lawyer and one to the plaintiff so the plaintiff doesn't have to pay taxes on their lawyer's fees?
Eat at Joe's.
If the database only returned information about people who have sued and LOST several times, it would have been less of a problem. As it stands, it's a danger to public health.
My guess is that the majority of malpractice suits are settled out-of-court.
That being said, the problem does not come from the doctors (well, it does, but the lion's share of the blame comes from ordinary folks like us). Doctors have insane insurance premiums. Many (ordinary old ones *without* malpractice claims against them) cannot continue practicing -- this is a huge problem in West Virginia, for instance, where doctors are leaving the state because they cannot afford to stay in business any more -- premiums are too high. Why are the insurance premiums so high? It's real simple -- because there's a lot of money flowing out in malpractice suits.
The problem is that our legal system is completely fucking idiotic when it comes to lawsuits. We award *phenomenal* damages in many cases -- malpractice is a big one, or almost anything where "pain and suffering" has a price tag put on it. Other countries don't have the litigous reputation that the US has not because it's so much harder to win cases, but because people filing lawsuits don't *make* the kind of mind-boggling prizes that they do in the US.
This is not a problem unique to the medical profession. It's the reason we have warnings on almost all products (and slathered so liberally that nobody reads them, meaning that safety is lower to people's asses are covered). It's why I have a "Contents may be hot! Sip carefully!" warning staring at me from my disposable coffee cup each morning.
It will take a nation where multimillion dollar lawsuits aren't won over spilling coffee on onesself to restore sanity.
May we never see th
I just ask my friends who they would suggest for some doctor.
Any physician who would use such a list is not a physician I would ever seek a consult with. Please put me on that list...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
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.The most basic flaw in the professor's assumptions is thinking that $1 in the hands of one individual means as much as it does for another. If you consider what different people would be willing to do to earn that dollar in the first place, this is clearly not the case.
Wikileaks, no DNS
Do I believe you that you make less than $31,500? Sure. Do I care that your dad pays that much for insurance? Not when you figure his take-home pay (pretax) is $500,000. Should you care? No. After all, he makes over 16x your salary.
So what am I saying? I dunno. I guess that your dad is easily in the top 1% of US wage earners and ought to quit bitching about insurance costs.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
In the case of doctors I think that firstly, Dutch people are less likely to think that a medical problem has been caused by incompetence of or malpractice by a doctor. They appreciate that there is only so much that a doctor can do and that it is sometimes very difficult or even impossible to predict what the effect of certain treatments will be.
Secondly, I think that in the Netherlands it is appreciated more that doctors are only human, that medical professions are extremely difficult and that doctors are under a lot of pressure, and are therefore more inclined to let things go even if they do think that a doctor made an honest mistake.
I don't really know what causes these differences in attitude. It probably comes down to historical differences in the development of our two cultures, as well as perhaps the level of education.
Sadly, there are signs that there will be changes for the worse here. For instance, the Dutch "bar association" wants to start experimenting with "no cure no pay" legal aid, which had previously been prohibited in the Netherlands (perhaps another cause for the difference in attitude).
First a bit of explenation on how "telepathy" works. Don't jump this is a scientific thing trust me.
Basicly it's just reading body language. If you study the subject long enough a good precentage of the time you can tell what a person is thinking (or get remarkably close) just by the way they fidget. Strong emotions are the easiest.
Ok now that you understand I'm not using some mystic nonsense but body language...
When I went to a dentist to have some teath pulled he was bothered about the fact that I am nervous around medical profesionals. (Well I am ok?) He asked a string of questions before he'd even accept me as a patent. I thought it was for medical reasons. That he had only certen kinds of experence and didn't want to accept patents he couldn't help.
It's when I asked that he pull the tooth (and not save it) that he got very conserned. I asked him why and he mentioned something about lawsutes.
His body language was shaky. He'd been sued recently for a large sum of money for frivilous reasons and wasn't intrested in pulling my tooth when it could be saved becouse I might sue him later for not saving the tooth.
I ended up going to annother dentist who was only slightly less bothered. He pulled the tooth as requested but still thinks I shouldn't have done that.
But it took me a while to find the second dentist.
And I didn't sue for the loss of my tooth. Thats stupid. But I know there are people out there that actually would do that.
I don't actually exist.
$150K/year minus those charges is rich to most of us.
Keep in mind:
(a) About a third to half that goes to malpractice insurance, according to the post. I'll believe it. Say that cuts it down to $70K to $100K
(b) Now consider that the person mentioned there is working over 1.5 times a normal 40 hr workweek. Cut that down $45K to $65K.
(c) I have no idea what the benefits cost, though I know that they're quite pricy given that one doesn't get to do group negotiation. Let's assume $500/mo, which is probably extremely conservative. That's another $6K off of it...now we're looking at $39K to $59K.
(d) Then consider the fact that they are going to be hammered on taxes.
(e) Remember that they had to get their doctorate, do residency, etc. They weren't making a hell of a lot of money all that time. That's years of income (income *early in their lives*) that they couldn't get and earn interest on.
(f) Medical school isn't cheap. A medical doctor is likely to enter his profession with hefty student loans and the associated interest to pay off. That's years of loan payments.
Finally, consider the fact that they are not doing a particularly easy job. They're working in an extremely stressful field (I'm sure all of us feel like that, but how often do you hold someone's life in shaking fingers while their entire family waits outside and their grandmother is tearing her hair out in agony?) They can face horrific lawsuits that can end their career for the slightest slip-up. Many doctors are on-call a huge chunk of the time. A doctor generally needs to spend a not insignificant amount of time reading up on their field to keep up with the latest medicines, cures, discovieries, etc. (Admittedly, the tech field is probably in this one aspect, but most areas are not.)
And in exchange, people say that, yes, all that is awful, but that they "get to help people", which nicely assuages their sense of guilt (this ideology helps will refusing to vote for wage increases for public school teachers as well). If you want to find for unethical, wealthy fat cats, look among executives, look among lawyers, look among investment bankers, because you're going to have much healthier pickings than among doctors. The sort of people that become doctors aren't doing it because they're lazy and like taking the path of least resistance -- it's fucking hard to become a doctor. They aren't doing it because they're stupid.
I'm darn glad I'm not a doctor. They have a tough job to do, they catch flak from a ton of people, and they get complained at by all the aging (and, surprise, *less healthy than they used to be) baby boomers. They get people griping about their poor insight or mistake-making, but if they go all-out to try to cure some poor sod that got himself chewed up something awful, how often does a family bring them a plate of cookies or something? Heck, our *postman* regularly eats lunch with the family down the street when he comes by -- the ever-so-much-more-personal doctor gets shunted into the background. No, I'm just thankful that I'm well clear of the whole mess, and get to work in the much more friendly technology field.
May we never see th
A great movie that shows a personal injury lawyer in a bad light is The Sweet Hereafter, about a school bus accident in a small town, and the lawsuits that follow, and much more. This is a Canadian film by Atom Egoyan.
Share. Until it becomes uncomfortable. Or at least a little.
Making blacklists are fine. The problem is using blacklists -- it's a form of prejudice where either the user doesn't really knows the criteria by which someone got onto the list, or where the criteria is virtually meaningless.
"Has Sued" doesn't really tell the user anything useful. It doesn't tell you whether the patient is a litigious bastard who should be avoided, or if the patient was unlucky enough to hire an incompetent doctor.
So I don't have a problem with doctors who make blacklists; I have a problem with doctors who use something as clumsy as blacklist to filter. Let's blacklist them!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
A trial by Jury can be waived in favor of a trial by Judge. I would think that the defendent in a tort cause can decide if the trial is by a judge (which should be more rational) or a by a jury(who knows, roll the dice).
If the case is this stupid then I would think that judge could throw it out anyway.
Does anyone know what the limits are on getting a trial by Judge?
I feel that way, strongly. The good we derive is far greater than the trivial cost in my time. (I'm salaried and secure as anyone really is in today's economy, granted, so the inconvenience is more minor for me than it would be for a small business owner.)
Meanwhile the parent post you responded to is simultaneously deriding me as an idiot and railing against the legal system in general in ways that don't seem particularly more informed than today's "talking points." Perhaps I'll just take his or her sense of how justice works with a grain of salt, seeing as how he or she isn't a participant and feels contempt toward those who are.
(Not that this person can't still vote for a knee-jerk candidate who touts a)the death penalty and b)limitations to liability as the answer to all our problems... Let's hear it for the demagogues.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Then you have the fact that the review committees in every case are made up of doctors and professionals,
That is utterly absurd. Do you trying to imply that doctors will falsify findings because someone who is *also* a doctor might be negatively impacted? Bullshit. If I find a computer programmer who is doing a lousy job and in the process screwing someone over, I'll be the first to bring up criticisms. Heck, if anything, it's even more annoying, because you *know* what the person should be doing.
Doctors are not some kind of Freemason secret society out to cover each other's asses any more than any other profession is -- that is, not at all.
May we never see th
Yeah, sure. These poor defenseless MULTI-BILLION dollar insurance companies are being beaten up by these legal meanies. How utterly simpleminded.
If it were still legal, these insurance companies could BUY YOU with the spare change they find in the employee lounge. They are more than capable of mounting their own defense.
Oddly enough, their bean counters are too busy trying to pinch pennies for the quarterl earnings statements. They would rather find the cheapest, lowest end shops that they can find and then bully them so that all of their best and brightest people leave for PI work.
If an insurance company loses at trial, it's either due to merit or their own unwillingess to invest in their own defense.
You people need to get more intimate with the insurance industry.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I'd back a $250K liability cap in a *second*.
Here's the reasoning.
* No doctor makes enough (especially in an environment where they don't charge extra to pay for huge insurance premiums) to ignore a quarter of a million dollars. Doctors are not going to sit down and go "well, I'm probably wrong, but I don't really give a crap about this guy's life, and hell, what's $250K anyway?" The dissuasive factor of a lawsuit is still there.
* It's hard to put a price on, say, the loss of a limb. However, ultimately, someone has to bear the blame. Before medical science, you would have just been screwed. Now, you can sometimes be helped when you have severe medical problems. Sometimes practitioners make mistakes, and you are injured in care. The question is whether the doctors should do it, or you should do it. Frankly, if "the doctors do it" is your answer, it translates to "everyone else does it" via malpractice insurance, which is a phenomenally inefficient process and blows away even more money. All you do is increase my medical costs to try to fund some other guy who's crabby that his doctor isn't perfect.
Medical care is just ridiculous these days. People should be able to go in to a doctor, get the help that the doctor can give (which, by golly, is not going to be perfect) and pay a sane price for their care. And folks accept the (existant, though small) risk that they will be hurt in meidcal care. I can have a tree fall over on me, have a car hit me, get horribly injured by a falling power line, be wounded by a stray bullet or crippled in a climbing accident, whatever. The chances of me getting a wrong limb amputated by a doctor simply *pales* in comparison to the other things that just plain can happen to you in the world at large. And yet I blow a huge amount of money on any medical visits, because of the vast awards granted people firing off lawsuits.
I miss the good old "sometimes life serves you lemons" bit. Sometimes, bad things can happen. Society is willing to terribly disadvantage everyone to try to eliminate the last little bit of people who got the sharp end of the stick. It's just silly.
May we never see th
Since the incident whereby I watched as the two nurses spilled half the second unit of blood on the floor trying to hook it up to my existing IV was AT THE SAME HOSPITAL, only two months before Willie King.
Two other cases you may not be familiar with in that hospital. A week after Willie King, the wrong respirator was turned off, and the patient died. Finally, I sit next to a gentleman at work who had his eye surgery botched at UCH in Tampa.
This is 4 cases that I know of in this ONE facility. When I was out with a scout troop this weekend, I informed the ASM that is also an EMT that if something happened to me, any hospital but UCH was ok. My regular physicians have the same instructions.
since I had a second one done on the other side and it doesn't hurt. It took me a while to figure out that this was the cause, but my final take was that the trade was worth it, in this case.
There are two other reasons why I won't go back to that hospital again anyway.
I never really said he did wrong anyway. I assume that something got nicked on the way past. Short of having an X-ray machine watching your every move while doing such a thing, I'm sure it happens. And having an x-ray watching during such a procedure has other issues that are even more dangerous.
If I misplace a variable no one dies. A doctor misplaces a scalpel, well you know.
You might be terribly surprised.
Say there's some guy writing a module to allow, via Visual Basic, some sort of easy Word mail merge functionality. It has a couple of bugs with edge cases, but it works well for him, so he doesn't care. He sells this as shareware for a while. Eventually, his code is sold to a company which sells a bundle of office add-ons. This company is bought out by Microsoft, which is interested in some version-control features that that company provides. They integrate this with Office, along with much of the rest of the Office bundle that company sells. Later on, some guy hired as a subcontractor to a company paid by a hospital to computerize their patient-handling system. He uses the mail-merge system to provide automated daily printouts to each physician of information on each patient they will deal with during the course of a day. Unfortunately, when the mail merge system deals with a database with more than 32K records, it switches to a different allocation scheme for more efficiency. It tries to revert back to the old scheme when it shrinks to a size of less than 32K records, but has an off-by-one problem that causes the second record in the database to be used as both the first and second entries in the mail merge in such a scenario. Unfortunately, three years into using the system, the hospital hits the bug, and a doctor is given incorrect medical information.
What about flow of casuality across software? Suppose I send in a patch to libjpeg that speeds it up on processors that have certain FPU guarantees. I'm unaware of a subtle bug. Someone uses libjpeg in an application (hell, libjpeg use probably exists all over the place)...including, say, Internet Explorer. This makes the application overwrite some memory that it shouldn't, and thus converts a linked list into a cycle. When the linked list is copied, the application consumes all the memory on the system This then causes another *crucial* program running on the system to be unable to get any memory, and basically stops it dead. I wasn't working with airline control software or anything like that, but my innocent mistake just screwed something serious up.
Finally, there are definitely cases of programmers screwing things up and people dying. You *sure* you've never made a thread synchronization mistake? (If you haven't, you're a better man than I -- heck, probably better than Linus Torvalds or Alan Cox or John Carmack or any other "big name" developers) If you think you might be open to this, try looking up the Therac-25, a rather nasty case of some synchronization problems combined with some software being reused when it probably shouldn't have been, and you have the reason why most modern medical equipment capable of irradiating humans has hardware locks in addition to software.
May we never see th
Maybe, just maybe, its the insurance companies that have gotten out of control?
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
The problem is that you're saying "I expect a doctor to provide perfect service and expect him to pay for the full amount of deviation his service moves from being perfect".
What if someone said to me "I expect your code to be perfect and expect me to pay for the full amount of deviation my software moves from being perfect." Heck, in lack of intuitiveness of user interface *alone*, I'd say that there wouldn't have been a single piece of proftable software out there.
Holding people to a perfect standard is not feasible. Yes, you can convince them to check and double-check -- but even NASA loses probes, despite all their double- and triple- checking, and tons of redundant systems. A doctor is going to screw up during their lifetime. It *will* happen. No matter what doctor you go to, you cannot get a certainty of perfect service, so the only other option, the only thing that you can consider service from this doctor a "damaged" variation of, is having your medical problems untreated -- almost certainly worse.
I'd be more than happy to sign a form saying that I waive the right to sue a doctor if I knew that a doctor had a good history of work, if it could get rates down to a sane level, instead of pissing away masses of money into the inefficient insurance industry. People die, for one reason or another. You can't buy perfect safety, and I'm not really worried about having the wrong limb amputated by a doctor -- I'm much more worried about the irresponsible drivers out there.
May we never see th
My mom's Doctor made a large booboo once. He ripped up the LARGE bill when he found out his 'diagnose' of the Flu was acutally my baby sister. He's no longer practicing (Not by our doing.. AMA got to him) .. Go figure.
I'd have to say stopping at accidents is a dicey business at best. If you don't have the tools/training, you might be hurting more than helping.
Disclaimer: I'm an ER doc, and I've got about every certification you can shake a stick at... BLS, ACLS, ATLS, Pediatric ALS, etc, etc... in addition to experience rendering care under fire as a tactical medic. I'm comfortable rendering care in the field, partially from my training, but also because EMS direction is part and parcel of EM practice. I also carry my jump bag in my vehicle, so I've got advanced airway management, hemorrhage control, monitoring capability... all in a backpack.
I stop at traffic accidents if they happen right in front of me, or if there is no EMS on scene. However, I would not expect a radiologist to stop (in fact, I'd almost hope he wouldn't... he'd probably just be in the way). If somebody is really FUBAR'd and needs me to stay with them, I stay until they're in qualified hands (that may mean a ride to the hospital)... otherwise, I immediately hand off to the medics and leave.
Having a medical license doesn't mean you're qualified to offer care in the field. For my own part, if I was laying bleeding in the road somewhere, I'd rather have a paramedic (or maybe a surgeon) than some of my colleagues. I don't mean that as an insult to other doctors... but care in austere environments is very different from the office... it's simply not within the scope of most physicians' practice or experience.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Last time I looked, there was an entire subset of lawyers making a pretty decent living by helping with jury selection. (That's just the first google hit I got, among many.) Gee, if only the people who employed those folks knew your simple axiom -- only hire the stupid people -- is what everyone does!
Maybe you could start a consulting firm on the side, and compete with seminars like this "Mastering Voir Dire" one. Best of luck with that.
Life ain't simple.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
The Denver Post is running a two part series on Colorado's Board of Medical Examiners (Buried mistakes / Prescription for conflict). Part one was yesterday, part two is today. It addresses the sealed door policy of Colorado's Board of Medical Examiners and the negative consumer effects when compared to other states with more public access to board business.
To be up front with my bias: The ordeal of my wife and I is included as part of this series.
Prior to the unfortunate events surrounding the botched misdiagnosis of my wife's condition, I was a "trust your doctor" kind a guy. I expect the proverbial used car salesperson to have anything but my interests in mind, and so I adjust accordingly - caveat emptor - and do my research, ask questions, get it in writing, etc. With my doctor, however, I trusted them explicitly and implicitly. This trust was essential because I don't have the resources (time and money) to acquire a medical degree in order to accurately evaluate my current medical needs.
My trust was based on an outdated perception that every doctor would "Do No Harm" in the spirit of the Hippocratic Oath. In our case, the doctor effectively destroyed this trust. It took several years to rebuild this trust with several excellent physicians. To get there, we had to education ourselves. In the past 9 years, we have read tens of thousands of pages from medical books and journals. We have a medical library to rival any first year medical resident. All this so we could put ourselves in the position to 1) ask intelligent questions and 2) know when we were getting an intelligent answer. It's a sobering experience to be informed enough to ask treatment option questions of a doctor - a specialist and expert, no less - only to be told the photocopied JAMA article you hold in your hands doesn't exist!
The principle problem with medical doctors, in general, is 1) debilitating levels of arrogance and 2) greed. Medical doctors, in general, are far more interested in protecting income, maintaining monopoly of "treating" all things biological and establishing legislative immunity to their actions. Colorado's doctor friendly legislature passed the "Doctor Apology Bill", C.R.S. 13-25-135, last July. So now, not only it the process of the Colorado Board of Medical Examiners sealed from public view, but if the doctor apologizes to you or your family about the fact they just amputated the wrong leg, it is inadmissible in court against him! Just who the **** does this serve? Certainly not me, the consumer. But it is the feel-good-bill of the decade for medical doctors.
In the past 9 years, I have come to acquire a level of medical knowledge and understanding that has allow me to embarrass a number of doctors. I truly wish this wasn't so, but when it concerns the health of my family, I care squat about some doctors puny ego. As a result, we have flat out fired a number of doctors and pursued third and fourth opinions (variance of opinions is a whole separate and frightening subject). It's nauseating to see any adult toss a tantrum, it's especially revolting to see a medical doctor hiss and froth when you fire them.
As of today, we have assembled an excellent team of medical doctors who have each, by virtue of their character, helped us regain our trust in medical doctors. Finding these physicians capable of practicing Medicine (with a big "M") has been the result of applying a very simple set of criteria each must meet to be considered capable of treating my family:
1) Can they say the words "I don't know." Had my wife's first doctor, the one who botch the diagnosis, be able to says these words, we would have found the proper treatment MUCH sooner and we would have never considered a law suit. Even on the stand, this doctor COULD NOT acknowledge that there were things she didn't know. Colossal arrogance.
2) Can I call them by their first name.
The rest we can discover together.
"A child of 5 could do this! Fetch me a child of 5!"
In 2000:
US- 77.1 years
UK - 77.7 years
France - 78.8 years
Belgium - 77.8
I'm not even going to bother listing more, the US has a relatively poor average life expectancy because of rampant obesity leading to such things as diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
Now crawl back under your rock troll.
I am NaN
- 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)
Ah, *now* I know a good way to pick up a good job -- network while on jury duty.
May we never see th
I am not a doctor, I am a patient. When you sue the hospital for 40 mln dollars, these dollars are taken from me. As a result I get cheaper food, less effective cheaper drugs, overworked nurses and no chance to have a necessary expensive operation.
I understand the frustration when a doctor fucks up yet another operation, amputating the wrong leg. But suing the hospital for money is wrong. There are other options, which are more effective and do not harm other patients. Demand that the doctor is fired and banned from medical profession. Demand that the hospital administrator is fired and fined and jailed and what not. But don't try to extort millions from the hospitals.
You may say that you deserve a compensation for your disability. Well, in a perfect world you would. But as long as your oversized compensation comes at the expense of our hospital care, you don't deserve it sorry. Even if that Ricardo Romero guy wasn't a useless illiterate latinos, I would still say that his now lost health was not worth 40 million. Again, I repeat, the money is ultimately taken from the patients, because the hospital needs to somehow compensate for the loss of cash (I don't think the government will pay the fines for it).
P.S. I am aware that the 40 mln was appealed in this particular case. The principle still holds - don't sue the hospitals for money.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Who the hell are you talking about? I'm talking about Bill Clinton, father, W.J. Blythe, who was not a politician in the remotest sense.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
The legal system only collects damages for a handful of the total number of people who are injured by doctors. Note: I did not say auto accidents, work accidents. I am limiting this to doctors negligence, abuse, and maltreatment.
Those are very real issues. When a routine medical procedure is botched and the result is a lifetime of pain, disability, lost earnings, and severely reduced quality of life/and or loss of life someone has to be held to account. Some things are Monday morning quarterbacking, most things are pretty cut and dry if all of the facts are in.
In all honestly, doctors aren't sued enough for the harm that they do cause. You know why? It's very hard to win, and just like with LEO there is a code of silence about mistakes. Did they happen to leave a few parts behind? Operate on the wrong body part? Nick a disc while they were in there that will cause you lifelong pain? Give you the wrong drug (Happens several thousand times every single day in our hospitals.) or the wrong amount of the drug in question?
That doesn't even get into abuse, which also happens. Patient difficult complaining of pain hitting nurse button over and over again? Take away morphine drip "That will teach him" --. Then we have nursing homes where the elderly are basically warehoused and if they are lucky only neglected. Then we have doctors that simply deny pain management and proper treatment to those with severe injuries or refer them away after taking their cash. Far worse goes on day to day in the health care industry, everything from doctors and nurses shorting patients of drugs to resell/use them themselves. Massive overbilling for procedures that didn't occur and other out and out fraud. Reccommending treatments/test/referrals purely to enrich buddies with no medicinal value whatsoever. There has to be a place to deal with these kinds of problems as well, and quite frankly the criminal system wont do it. That leaves us with the civil courts.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
I imagine this is your educated medical opinion, huh? For what it's worth, Down's syndrome is caused by trisomy 21 (that's having three of the 21st chromosome). It's never caused by birth trauma, and I know of no suits that have challenged as such. However, Cerebral Palsy is effectively a stroke suffered by the fetus/infant during the birth process. This is almost always caused by birth trauma, and in many of these cases this is due to medical negligence/incompetence.
The total crap part is that you can sue ANYTIME after birth and claim that the doctor that delivered you caused any problems that you have now. I personally talked to a doctor that is being sued by some parents because their child didnt get into the college they were planning on, so they sued the doctor for causing long lasting brain damage 18 years after the birth. The really sad part is the doctor lost the lawsuit and is now repsonsible for paying millions of dollars of damages to the family. And let me say, this is a totaly normal kid who simply didnt get high enough grades on his entrance exams to a college, not some highly deformed retarded human being.
I don't know what sort of sob stories your doctor friend told you, but one can usually tell cerebral palsy from a dumb kid. Just because the jury screwed up in that case doesn't mean that all doctors should get off the hook in all cases for screwing up.
I'm sure that the jury system in the US doesn't help, but don't expect your doctor buddy to tell you the whole truth, as he's just as biased as the plaintiffs.
Hey, I just checked into the salaries of neurosurgeons and I bet that you didn't have to pay for college. The average going rate for a neurosurgeon in 1998 in L.A. is $483,774. Even a general surgeon makes on average $255,438 according to the federal government. $150k of malpractice insurance is a cost of doing business too, so it's probably a write-off to some degree.
So, in sum, $150,000 is a lot of money to pay per year, but it allows for your dad to continue making a substantial amount of money on top of that. I certainly hope you didn't have to pay for college:)
OK, asswipe. No guesses. Here's how Sen. Edwards made his dirty trial lawyer millions:
A 5-year-old girl was playing in a community pool in Wake County, NC. She sat on an uncovered pool drain (someone had removed the cover earlier that day) and had most of her large intestine pulled out through her anus by the suction, before the pumps were turned off and she could be rescued. She will be fed through a stomach tube for the rest of her life.
The maker of the pool initially offered the family $100,000. Edward's firm discovered at least twenty other identical accidents involving that same drain cover design... then when the company offered another lowball settlement ($250,000), the family went to court and won $25 million... only 1/3 of the maximum possible award.
The case was a classic one of corporate indifference to a known defective product. The victims were (every one of them) children. How exactly do you think the courts should have decided in this case? Do you think 'tort reform' would have saved any of those children from disfigurement or death?
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
I'll reply to your posting instead of replying to dogdaze.
Think of the focus these people require, think of responsibility and stress.
No stress from a programming deadline can be compared to that. And athletes have games with breaks, twoce per week at max.
Surgeons do it for many hours straight, and do these surgeries much more often. And even slightest error on their part costs much more.
so, I can understand them getting paid more (as well as, for example, pilots).
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
For a doctor at a clinic, maybe it's worth it for them to announce to each patient that they are being recorded for lawsuit purposes. That way, it will be clear that the doctor has given this person their options, etc. If the patient doesn't want to be recorded, they can go somewhere else, right?
>Medical care is not a consumable. You do not set out one day to select a "baby blue" hysterectomy to go with the curtains.
;-). It is your choices to become obese and not exercise caused you to fall sick eventually (in most cases).
5 288
3 832
5 624
t hreshol d=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=8289021
3 832 ) and made money the only thing that matters to some of them. Thus money/profit got into the system and became its goal.
Still, majority of illnesses are an indirect result of your own "conduct" (maybe the last word in not the best one, but my English is not perfect
Here is my view of the problem that got moderated down by some moron: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=99645&cid=849
Also read this older comment: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=96859&cid=828
>Medicine (and my mother is a physician, a Tulane grad of 1950) has been changed from a profession with a fee-for-service to a complex group of "providers" and "managers" where the goal is PROFIT.
I know. Here is an another posting of mine: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=99645&cid=849
>The Reagan administration took a disturbing trend and made it mainstream: Add a layer or two of paper-pushers and call it "managed care" - AND THE INVISIBLE HAND OF THE MARKET WILL SAVE US MONEY!
I haven't lived in this country in the Reagan times. However, I've worked in a healthplan. Here is my take on HMOs:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=96895&
Combine these four linked articles of mine, and you'll see what got all of us in trouble: people do not want to listen these who know (paternalistic model) and change themselves. So, they start getting sicker and sicker. Science answers a social call and invents treatments that work regardless of what the patient's subconscious wants.
At the same time, rise of consumerism (that is a philosophy of demanding the best service and ignoring the hints of the Universe trying to teach you) puts final nails into a coffin of the personal responsibility and the paternalistic model that was founded on it. All they want is the providers of quality services who will treat them instead of teaching them.
Result - getting lawyers involved as a "quality control". Rampage of lawsuits killed the former role of doctor in the community (more about it here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=96859&cid=828
However, I would not blame doctors and corporations for that; they just supply the demand of the people.
>It doesn't work. As I said at the outset: you don't start out your day to consume medical care as you would a lunch. Medicine is about disease, genetics, trauma, lifestyle choices and, MOST DEFINITELY, your education about your own health options. Physicians are trained and licensed to do just that.
Yep. Wholehartedly agree - especially with the teaching part. How would you implement the personal responsibility for health choices?
>Insurance companies should not practice medicine. Insurance companies should "pool risks" and provide universal coverage at a low profit-profile because it is unethical to kill people for money.
So, you think there should be unlimited treatment coverage for sick at the expense of the general public?
And it is not killing for money, it is more of a returning a concept of personal responsibility.
>Whose money, indeed?
Policypayers money that are consumed by these who get sick. You haven't disproved this thesis of mine: "I do not respect a system that does not have any accountability from these who use it (patients), and the Western medical system is pretty much like that. Eat crap, do not exercise, be fat, have a subconscious program of getting attention through getting sick - and these who exercise, eat helthy food, are fit and have a healthy psyche will pay for your endless source of pills, doctor visits and surgeries through their insurance premiums."
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
nor that they should be compensated extraordinary sums of money for said suffering
The jews demands for reperations didn't stem from their suffering, nor did they demand it from the Germans. They demanded reperations from the insurance companies that 'lost' their policies and the banks that 'lost' their money and valuables. They jews were preyed on during WWII by people who knew that whole families would be wiped out.
Insurance companies certainly keep a list of people who file frivolous lawsuits, so that they won't get involved with their scams.
Now, doctors (probably) have the same thing.
This list is one of two things...
Legit doctors listing sue-happy individuals.
Shifty doctors listing who they should avoid scamming.
In either case, this list is a good thing. If you are sue-happy, the doctors should protect themselves. If the doctors are the scammers, then you've just ended up on a list that will guarantee only the doctors on the up-and-up will treat you.
Of course no doctor can refuse life-saving treatment, but for anything non-critical, you can choose from millions of doctors in your are, so why worry about this list?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
You are a cretin, and an anonymous one at that. Do a little research, if you can type. Try googling 'Valerie Lakey'.
" Why not against the idiot who damaged the pool drain? The company had nothing to do with this."
And therin lies the point. The drain was known to be dangerous with the grille removed. The company knew this. They also knew 4 and 5 year olds could remove the grille. This wasn't an 'idiot' removing the grile - it was a kid. They had paid damages on similar incidents MORE THAN TEN TIMES BEFORE. No urban legend here - google 'Valerie Lakey'.
The company didn't tell anyone, warn anyone, they didn't do anything. If you think that Sta-Rite "were not to blame" then there is no hope for you. Vote for President W Shithead again, get your fucking tort 'reform' and when your kid is mangled, or it's your ass on the line, good luck.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
The statistics about malpractice deaths were published by the AMA in 1997.
What's up with you crazy mods??
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
You gave a string of very unlikely scenarios, whereas I gave "Doctor leaves the scalpel in the patient"
In other words indirect versus direct. I'll take my chanes with indirect anyday.
First rant:
OK.
Your doctor screwed the pooch. ( On *your* operating table, no less ).
The limit is N dollars. Pick an N.
Now, to try to cover over the damage the doctor did though negligence ( and it is negligence, you have it from on high that you will win the case ), it will take M * N, M > 1, just to keep you from suffering pain and anguish for the rest of your life.
Hey, does that payout limit look so good to you now?
And that doesnt stop the fraudster person who got a blister falling on the doctors floor cause he is a member of the three stooges from sueing for N, even though the problem was taken care of with 1.98 in hydrogen peroxide, bandages, and a muzzle.
Good thinking.
Second rant:
And dont get me started about insurance companies. My mother had TMJ. Caused her a lot of pain. Insurance would ( for a limited time ) pay for pain meds. They would not pay for a procedure that had a fair chance of leaving her pain free. It was more cost effective that way, you see.
emt 377 emt 4
Do you know what medical malpractice costs you (as an average American) a year? About fifteen bucks.
Why is this such a big issue?
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
(rolls eyes)
Look, she spilled it when she was a passenger in the back seat. McDonalds serves coffee at 180 degrees at the drive up. Does it take a rocket scientist to figure out that a large number of people are going to end up spilling coffee on themselves after getting said coffee? And that these people have a good chance of wearing pants that will trap in the hot liquid? That these people are likely to be sitting down and buckeled in, thus making it very difficult to remove their pants in the two to seven seconds that it will take the coffee to give you 3rd degree burns? Whats not surprising is the fact that she got burns on her crotch, whats surprising is that it doesn't happen more often.
So no, its not remotely close to only one customer out of 25 million that has gotten burned. She's just the worst case that we've heard about.
Only just happened back and saw this. Just can't keep yourself from insulting me, can you? What evidence are you basing this claim on, please? You use the word "correlation," plainly implying that there are data behind the assertion.
If you look back at my post, you'll see that I specifically pointed out the very point you're making -- that as a salaried employee I'm in a different spot than those who aren't. Gawrsh, did you think I didn't get the point when I made it myself? Shucks, I shore dew have trubble followin' stuff... Good thing you're here to set me straight.
Talk about your reductive, stubbornly one-sided takes on an issue. I've pored over your post for any possible suggestions of ways to improve the court system, but found nothing but a sort of proud, indignant cynicism.
Juries aren't perfect. They're like a democratic republic -- only as good as the people who take part. You're undercutting the justice you'd claim to feel so strongly about, and congratulating yourself on being so danged knowing about it in the act. No thanks.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.