The medmal crisis isn’t just affecting doctors, it’s having an impact on nurses, too:
Kimberly Ridpath was shocked to learn earlier this year that the malpractice insurance policy for her 150 health care workers had been canceled.
In three years of supplying nursing homes with nurses and assistants, no lawsuits had ever been filed against her Mechanicsville firm, Advantage Staffing.
…The tension over the future of her company and its 150 employees took its toll.
“I cried. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep,” said Ridpath, a registered nurse.
(Could this be the woman Senator Edwards was talking about?) She eventually found a policy, at roughly ten times the price of her original. It’s the nursing home work that makes her company such a high risk. But the problem isn’t confined to nurses who staff nursing homes. Midwives and nurse practitioners, who often serve the underserved, are finding their malpractice insurance premiums rising, too. As result, they can no longer afford to staff public health clinics on the cheap as they once did. Tort reform. It really should be a bipartisan issue.
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