"Physicians, Heal Thyselves..."
It's official.
The medical malpractice issue is now officially about scoring political points and slinging mud.
The Democrats rightly assert that a $250,000 cap on pain and suffering awards in malpractice suits is inhumane. The Republicans, however, feel strongly that, even though they most assuredly will lose this vote, they can still use it as a handy way to embarrass the Democrats, and create a non-issue issue.
Which will play well on the Fox News Channel.
Meanwhile, your health care and your rights to sue for damages if something goes terribly wrong are no longer anyone's concern save your own. Besides, as we've seen time and again, no one in this government cares particularly much for your insignificant concerns. You are obviously greedy, and care not for the rights of god-fearing shareholders and physicians.
Hey, we all know you'd sacrifice little Timmy or Gramps in a heartbeat for a clear shot at a windfall payday from Aetna or Pfizer.
No, this is hardball lobbying politics on a grand scale, and no one plays the game any better than the insurance industry.
The simple truth of the matter is that the AMA has rolled belly-up in the face of the onslaught from the insurance guys, and it's done an horrendous job of creating a self-policing profession. Are there bad writers? Yes. Bad cops? Yes. Bad dry cleaners? Of course. Bad Doctors? Shhhhh, it does no one any good to talk of such things.
There have always been incompetent doctors mixed in with the truly gifted and caring. But, in an era where there was direct, on-going human contact and fee-for-service insurance, patients would slowly stop going to the good Dr. Quack and take their families elsewhere.
But here, as in any situation where the insurance industry becomes involved, all humanity and proportion fly out the window.
Managed care insurance tells you just whom you will see for medical treatment and just what you can be treated for. A doctor's livlihood now depends on being pliable to the insurance company's dictates and, above all, for keeping costs down. The "good boys and girls" are sent more patients. The "bad" ones see less and less, as their costs of doing business soar. The actual quality of the care, of course, is immaterial.
You now have more chance of being seen by a poorly schooled, underqualified, over-worked physician than you do by one of quality and experience.
But, the AMA is silent.
Accidents, wrongful procedures performed, procedures performed badly, misdiagnoses, stories of surgical equipment and material left behind in patients' bodies, preventable deaths and all-around shoddy work have all skyrocketed.
But, the AMA is silent.
Obviously, these unfortunate patients have every right in the universe to be angry, and to take the hospital, drug company, doctor, nurse, orderly, the euphemistic "practitioner" or the hospitals' favorite—the low-paid "technician" nurse-replacement—to court for a redress of their grievances.
These people are injured, maimed or killed by people they've trusted.
If there was ever a proper use of our judicial system, it is this one.
Our system of trial-by-your-peers has held repeatedly that the pain and the hardship inflicted by health care personnel, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies was worth various, often weighty, sums of financial redress.
Just how much is the loss of a limb, an eye or ovaries worth to the victim of a botched surgery? How much is the senseless and needless loss of your child, your sibling or your parent worth to your family? How can mere money adequately compensate for that? How can any price tag ever begin to approach the devastating, irreparable hole in your family's life? How can congressional Republicans sleep at night after attempting to state that your legs or your poorly handled surgery is only worth $80,000, when they receive millions from Aetna, Chubb, Pfizer, Kaiser Permanente and the lot?
The N.Y. Times rightly points out: as Senate Majority Leader, as a Senator and as a Doctor, Bill Frist has been a leader in the fight to limit your right to sue.
...[Frist] and his family own substantial investments that would benefit from limits on medical liability. The group, the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, said the family's holdings in HCA, the nation's largest for-profit hospital chain, and a subsidiary, Health Care Indemnity, the fifth-largest medical malpractice insurer, created a conflict of interest.
I have heard it said by various types of trial attorneys that juries, amazingly, almost always "get it right."
Why can't the AMA?
Why hasn't more been done to stand up to the insurance companies and take underqualified doctors off staff? And to boot them out of private practice? Where are the standards?
The AMA's failure here has created an opportunity for everyone to point a finger in the wrong direction—namely, at you—as being too damn greedy, and inflamed by unscrupulous attorneys, trying to rip off the system, simply because your two-year-old will never walk again.
But, even if you have been sold a bill of goods by the law firm of I. Kangetcha Moola, Esq., the jury will still have their say. If there are mitigating circumstances, or if the person suffered little harm, the jury should be trusted to rule accordingly, as they most often have.
The big awards we hear about are for the serious violations of sanity and the Hippocratic oath. We never hear about the amounts knocked down or denied altogether. They don't make good copy, normally.
The AMA wants to keep its shiny pedestal in place.
The insurance industry wants to keep the weaker doctors in place, since they keep costs down. To further save on costs, they also want Congress to set a cap on awards for those times those weaker doctors screw up a little too badly. They well remember Ford's Pinto case, where the Ford board decided it was more cost-effective to pay off the families of those killed by exploding gas tanks than it was recalling and refitting all those damn cars.
Since no one wants to take the responsibility of policing themselves, some very highly financed and connected groups now want Congress to put the solution squarely where they feel it should be—on your obviously greedy shoulders.
And the Republicans seem to think that the American people—the very ones who keep getting maimed and killed by their trusted health care system, and who sit on all those juries—will think this is a great stick with which to beat up the Democrats.
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posted by Gotham 8:43 PM
