Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘medical’

Four law professors

…are out with a new study saying that medical malpractice payouts in Texas didn’t increase sharply between 1990 and 2002, hence no “crisis”, hence no case for damage limitations, etc., etc. (study; Reuters; N.Y.Times op-ed). Ted has some questions for the authors, though, at Point of Law. They seem like pretty good questions, too.

Other medico-legal topics covered recently at our sister website: the federal Health and Human Services department introduces an “early offers” pilot program; nurse-midwives call for reform; more criticism of New York Times coverage; and who gave the 66 cents?

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Michael O’Keefe, Sr. / ATLA on Med-Mal Reform

Reader Stan Sipple writes me that “a Louisiana attorney several years ago took you up on your proposal that plaintiffs’ attorneys should run insurance companies. Was this what the trial lawyers had in mind?”

Me, I’m sad; it’s been two weeks since I wrote that column. While ATLA issued a press release March 3 claiming and complaining that congressional legislation on caps won’t make medical malpractice insurance cheaper, they’re not taking advantage of my modest proposal how to simultaneously prove their point about tort reform, improve medical care, reduce malpractice insurance rates, and make more money. I can’t imagine why they’re passing up this opportunity if they believe what they say in their press release.

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The Times’s errors on malpractice, cont’d

I’ve just posted at Point of Law the second and I assume final installment of my long critique of Tuesday’s New York Times article on medical malpractice insurance. The Times coverage contended — in assertions picked up and repeated by many a credulous blogger — that the premium levels charged to doctors bear no relationship to payouts or to legal limits on damage recoveries. Part I of the critique, again, is here.

While you’re at it, you really should be reading Point of Law every day if you have any interest in the more serious side of litigation and its reform, or just want to follow Ted’s or my writing (we both post regularly there). Among the topics you would have learned about recently: the difference, among civil litigators, between “chicken catchers and chicken pluckers“; Colorado lawmakers may restore to homeowners the right not to be sued over “open and obvious dangers” on their property; FDA panel recommends letting Vioxx back on market; a new study of class actions by Yale’s George Priest; medical malpractice law in the U.K.; Sen. Biden praises “bottom-feeders”; silicosis diagnosis scandal; a new legal ethics blog; tons more stuff on the Class Action Fairness Act, including this, this and this; problems with that much-ballyhooed report on medical costs supposedly causing half of consumer bankruptcies; and the Wall Street Journal on loser-pays.

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New York Times on medical malpractice

Yesterday the Times published an article on medical malpractice insurance that’s has been getting a fair bit of attention. I thought the article had serious shortcomings and just posted a lengthy explanation of why on Point of Law, with more posting probably to come. (Feb. 23; see also Feb. 22). More: And Ted has a semi-satirical treatment of the issue just up at Point of Law, inaugurating a new “Column” section there.

On a different note, my flu seems to have had a relapse, so I may skip posting for a while. (Update 4:20 p.m.: doing a lot better after resting for a few hours.)

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“What the Doctor Saw”

“The court system through the eyes of a surgeon sued for malpractice/The jury needed just 15 minutes to end the case, but first orthopedist Stephen M. McCollam had to live under its cloud for four years.” Outstandingly reported account of a surgeon’s professional liability trial from the standpoint of the defendant and his family as well as the lawyers on both sides. Long, detailed, and in PDF format, but must reading (S. Richard Gard, Jr., “What the Doctor Saw”, Fulton County Daily Report (Atlanta), Jan. 31). Plus: letters, some very angry, from lawyers and other readers of the Daily Report (Feb. 7); Feb. 7 follow-up from Gard, who’s editor and publisher of the Daily Report as well as the author of the piece (via SymTym).

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Florida neurosurgeons

If a doctor has made three payouts in malpractice cases, there must be real grounds to worry that his care is substandard, right? In Florida, after all, voters last year approved a trial-lawyer-backed measure providing that physicians who lose three trials (as distinct from payouts short of that point) will have their license yanked. And yet if figures from one medical weblog are to be accepted, three payouts would not be considered anything special among members of one of the profession’s most elite specialties — neurosurgery — in one of the state’s most populous counties. According to a Nov. 21 item posted by Joseph F. Phillips, M.D., on wmed.com:

Read On…

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Ted’s mythbusting at Point of Law

Maybe he’s too modest to mention it here, but over at our sister website, Ted has been on a roll with several devastating posts correcting fallacies that have circulated during the past week’s intense news coverage of liability reform:

* The George Soros-sponsored, David Brock-run media gadfly organization, Media Matters for America, recently criticized the Washington Post for running coverage that was not (to its taste) sufficiently critical of medical malpractice reform. Trouble is, as Ted shows, Media Matters itself blundered into whopping errors on the subject, badly misrepresenting the views of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). “This is what MMFA gets for relying on ATLA fact sheets instead of primary sources.”

* Pointing to evidence that payouts by 98 Massachusetts doctors accounted for more than 13 percent of one year’s malpractice payouts in the state, the New York Times concluded that cracking down on bad doctors could greatly help the malpractice crisis. But the numbers announced in the study warrant no such conclusion;

* The Association of Trial Lawyers of America is out with a supposed fact sheet on medical malpractice, which (no surprise) Ted finds to be full of gross distortions. Equally embarrassing, he catches Illinois Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky posting on her official website a huge chunk of the lame ATLA argumentation, cut and pasted without acknowledgment of its interest-group origins. (Allen Adomite at Illinois Civil Justice League has more).

* Finally, Ted discovers the Alabama Trial Lawyers Association claiming that a profitable year in the property insurance business is reason to doubt that there’s a crisis in the liability insurance business.

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Welcome WAMT listeners

I was a guest on the Tampa program “Legal Forum” this afternoon, talking about Overlawyered and medical malpractice reform.

Overlawyered’s most recent posts on medical malpractice can be found here. You may also be interested in our more academically-inclined sister weblog, Point of Law, which also has a section about medicine and law, as well as two recent roundtables on the subject, including a debate between me and the head of Doctors for Kerry on the Bush malpractice proposal.

For more information on the Florida medical ballot initiatives, see our sister website Point Of Law, May 19, Jul. 20, Aug. 4, Nov. 2 first, second and third posts, Nov. 4, Nov. 5, and also Walter Olson’s WSJ piece of Oct. 29.

Host Matt Justine surprised me when he said that Florida medical malpractice payouts had been going down. It turns out not to be the case. According to a November 2002 report by Milliman USA, medical liability losses paid by Florida insurers increased 150% between 1991 and 2000.

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