In last night’s State of the Union address the president and his team of speechwriters took their usual jabs at our long held system of collecting damages from medical malpractice. “Congress must also…confront the epidemic of junk medical lawsuits” says Bush. We shouldn’t be too surprised anymore when we hear this stuff from him. His administration has been using insurance industry talking points to attack patients’ right to justice ever since he entered the White House. It does get tiresome though, especially when the "epidemic" he speaks of is based on a distortion of facts.
Luckily the Drum Major Institute compiled a great retort to the Bush speech. Their response to Bush’s admonition of “junk lawsuits”:
Appealing to the myth of rampant “junk lawsuits” will lead to measures that put patient safety in grave danger.. By blocking Americans’ ability to sue medical providers such “reform” would eliminate a critical incentive for maintaining high quality patient care.
· Medical lawsuits of any kind are hardly an epidemic: the number has remained stable and at points even decreased over the past ten years. However, capping medical malpractice liability would make middle-class Americans more likely to be injured or killed by medical negligence or a preventable error and eligible for lesscompensation if their lives are devastated by such malpractice.
· Capping malpractice liability limits the amount of money patients can receive when injured by medical negligence, and can effectively grant hospitals immunity from the consequences of their malpractice. As a result, capping liability for lawsuits is actually likely to increase the amount of medical errors that contribute to the cost of healthcare.
· The focus on malpractice lawsuits is misguided and will not make a significant impact on health care costs--the vast majority of medical errors that occur are the result of failed patient safety systems and not negligent doctors, and the costs associated with malpractice lawsuits account for less than 1 percent of the costs associated with health care.
· The best way to reduce the lawsuits President Bush complained about this evening is to modernize the practice of medicine and eliminate the avoidable medical errors that are the only reason these lawsuits exist.
· Insurance companies are profiting from of lawsuit sensationalism and misleading the public about the cause of malpractice premium increases. These companies make up for profit losses that naturally occur due to cyclical changes in the investment market by overcharging doctors for medical malpractice insurance.
Amen. Check out DMI’s full speech analysis here.
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