Monday, January 26, 2004
Again, That Ol' "Context" Bugaboo...
This sentence comes from today's MSNBC: First Read:0 comments
The President himself travels to Little Rock, AR to make remarks on medical liability reform at 12:30 pm.
What a wonderful-sounding phrase, "medical liability reform."
This obviously helps everyone.
Less danger of doctors having to fend off those trivial, pesky malpractice suits by all those crazies out there. This will lead to lower costs for insurance companies, then lower costs to your doctor and then lower costs to you, and everyone's happy.
Great!
Right?
Wrong.
This isn't "Medical Professional Liability Reform."
This is "Medical Industry Liability Reform."
Simply put, paying for all the terrible things that are happening to you, your family and your neighbors when you receive shoddy medical care is getting too expensive for Health Industry corporations.
So, instead of their fixing what is broken so that you no longer have a need to sue to receive justice for your misfortune, it's easier for the Industry to just take that ability away from you, so you won't use it so much.
Or ever.
For, as with its twin, "Tort Reform" legislation, Medical Liability Reform is intended to hide a simple truth:
There is a tidal wave of medical incompetence and vicious corporate disregard for your well-being sweeping over America, and the result of that is clogging up our judicial system.
And if they can't change you, they'll change the law. And if they can't get the law changed or if the Courts block them, they'll change the Constitution.
Because they can.
Despite the message repeated in the constant flow of "corporate good neighbor" press releases and warm-and-fuzzy sound bites, these malpractice suits do not constitute a quick and easy payday for dark, underworld characters and degenerates out to scam the system. And it's not "them" or "those crazies" who are clogging up the system and making costs for everyone skyrocket.
It's you.
It's you exercising your basic constitutional right to use the court system for redress of grievances when confronted by forces larger, and better financed, then just you yourself.
That is our American system of government, folks. Always has been.
But now corporations are working overtime to take that right away from you.
Because you keep using it, and it costs them too much money when you do.
That's as simple as this gets.
The same powerful economic forces that dictate that companies must simply take your job away and hand it to someone in Bangladesh to improve their bottom line apply here as well.
When dealing with any of these "reforms," it's always wise to "Look for the Lie."
The Lie here is that good, caring, well-trained and well-compensated physicians are being attacked on all fronts by rip-off artists, and THAT'S screwing up the system for everybody.
But this lie hides the fact that your kindly doctor's pay system has been utterly reconfigured by the insurance companies. He/she makes considerably less than before, so they must push more patients through in a day, spending much less time with each. Retrained by the insurance companies, many doctors only deal with what the insurance companies pay for, steering your treatment in that direction, and hoping that will help improve other areas that may also be a problem, but which aren't covered by that particular plan.
Obviously, decent, ethical doctors, nurses and other health professionals are frustrated by all this, but they're now stuck with a system not of their choosing. There just is no time for the small points or the fine points, or even the minimal hand-holding that's always been a major component of the healing arts.
Basically, they are as much pawns in all of this as you are.
The core of this legislation involves conglomerates in the insurance, drug and hospital industries. Not to mention the heightened, institutionalized blind eye turned to all of this by the American Medical Association. The AMA is directly responsible for creating, maintaining and policing standards and core competencies within the medical profession, as well as being their institutional advocate in the halls of Congress. The AMA should be in the forefront of pro-doctor/patient efforts; however, they remain silent as corporate interests rework the entire system to their own benefit.
This results in your wife or son going into the hospital for treatment, and being misdiagnosed by one of the few residents remaining after severe staff cutbacks, who is so overwhelmed and tired they can barely pronounce their own name.
Or your being given what hopefully is the right treatment and medicines by entry-level hospital support staff; folks with little-to-no general education, and definitely no medical training. These are the people sporting titles such as "Such-and-such Tech" that you now see doing most of the work in hospitals; work previously done by trained nurses and doctors. These Techs make close to minimum wage. Or as close to it as your local community standards will allow the institution to pay. Even these people were once covered by unions, which would set some type of standards; but since the unions were busted, the hospital can now establish the program as it sees fit.
Or you may have someone in your family go in for surgery, and afterwards feel excruciating pain, only to find the surgery team had inadvertently left a tool or scalpel sitting next to their spleen when the team sewed your loved one back up.
Or you may have a distracted or tired surgeon remove healthy tissue by mistake rather than the diseased tissue. An alarming number of women have awakened to find they had their healthy breast removed, rather than the cancerous one.
Here is how the Constitution and the body of law in the United States is currently set up: When any of these horrid tragedies befall you, if those individuals, companies or institutions involved duck responsibility, you have the right to take the perpetrator(s) to court for the purpose of forcing them to assume responsibility.
Our court system is set up in a forthrightly balanced way. A judge and a jury of your peers will listen to evidence and decide who is right in this case.
If your suit is deemed frivolous, or found to have no merit, they will decide to toss your case out of court or find for the defendant and charge you the defendant's reasonable court fees. This is fair.
If they decide in your favor, however, they also will decide what is a fair judgement in this case. If they decide the award should be multi-millions, then in their wisdom they felt this injury was that grievous, and that the award should be commensurate.
Juries don't scam the system.
Corporations scam the system.
They now tell you that these are "runaway juries" rather than allow the press to report that the system endemically creates and fosters mistakes, misdiagnoses, screw-ups and blatant disregard for you. It's just too big a pain in the ass and too expensive to fix it. So, the Industries involved have simply shifted the press focus to your callous disregard—and that of juries across America—for their attempts to protect the profit margins of shareholders.
Instead of looking at how to rework the judiciary to avoid huge awards, the AMA should be looking at how to better the lot and basic training and workload of doctors; corporate boards should be looking at how they can improve patient care, rather than merely the ledger sheet; doctors need to openly rebel against both the AMA and the insurance/hospital/drug companies to improve their lot; we who need medical care need to fight for every protection which the Founding Fathers gave us when creating this country.
So, no, this is not about your kindly neighborhood doctor being scammed by heartless reprobates, driving him/her into bankruptcy.
This is about major companies screwing your doctor, then using that as a way to screw you.
And the Constitution.
If you let them.
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posted by Gotham 1:50 PM
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