| 10/22/2006 |
| Symptoms point to insurance despite political misdiagnosis |
| BY
DAVID FALLK GUEST COLUMNIST |
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It is time that the deceptions, diversions and
denials being pushed by so-called “tort reformers,”
particularly in the medical establishment, are exposed and
rejected. Such “reform” is, in reality, nothing more than
avoidance of responsibility and accountability.
In 1999, the Institute of Medicine first blew the cover off the full extent of negligence and diminished care in our nation’s hospitals, placing the annual death rate from preventable errors at near 100,000. Although this largely hidden epidemic has been claiming the equivalent of two or three jumbo jet crashes every day, doctors’ groups and hospitals have tried to excuse or ignore that fact. But last year, even the Journal of the American Medical Association was forced to concede that the IOM’s numbers were probably too low. Recently, the Oct. 16 issue of Newsweek nailed the true crisis facing Americans as hospital health-care quality, not the legal system. As a result, health-care experts are finally owning up to the idea that health-care reform must start with acknowledging mistakes, disclosure to families and taking responsibility for errors. Those errors include misdiagnoses, delayed diagnoses, prescription mistakes, mixed-up lab reports, wrong-site surgeries and surgical instruments left inside patients, all of which cause unconscionable suffering and death in America. The Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council and the state’s Patient Safety Authority tell us that hospital-acquired infections, which had previously been hidden from public disclosure, needlessly add $2 billion to health-care spending in Pennsylvania annually. Similarly, it is wrong to blame any shortage of doctors on anyone but the health-care establishment itself. Last year, USA Today published an eye-opening expose documenting how medical groups themselves worked for decades to control and limit the number of doctors being trained in America. Other articles have gone on to explain the complexities involved in how and why physicians choose specialties and places to practice. Chief among those factors are differences in reimbursement rates, availability of support services and lifestyle choices. An overwhelming body of evidence now confirms doctors have an insurance problem, not a lawsuit problem. Statistics gathered by the courts show that over the past five years, while doctors’ insurance rates were climbing, the number of malpractice lawsuits filed in Pennsylvania dropped by nearly 40 percent. Nationwide, liability insurers raised doctors’ rates 120 percent, while the amount of money paid to victims and their families rose less than 6 percent during the same time period. Last week it was disclosed that the CEO of UnitedHeaIth Group, William McGuire, was paid (I hesitate to say earned) more than $522 million between 1992 and 2005, and he could be leaving the company with additional compensation that could double that figure. Sadly, all we hear from the medical community and politicians like Sen. Rick Santorum, Rep. Don Sherwood and Lynn Swann is how we need to “fix” the legal system by arbitrarily limiting the amount of money seriously injured patients can recover in cases where negligence and malpractice have already been proven. Unlike those politicians who bow to pressure from their supporters in the insurance industry, drug lobby and big business, we need elected officials who won’t curtail the rights of average people to pursue justice in the courts. Election Day provides a way for ordinary citizens to fight back and show politicians like Messrs. Santorum, Sherwood and Swann, and their allies in the responsibility-avoidance lobby, that we can no longer afford their misdiagnoses of the problem and snake-oil remedies. DAVID I. FALLK is a Scranton trial lawyer and president of the Committee for Justice for All, a public advocacy group comprising trial lawyers.
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