I find it hard to believe that doctors aren’t motivated by the dollar amount of damages; that’s like saying drivers don’t care whether their car gets dented or totalled because it’s picked up by insurance.
Furthermore, if lawyers can’t expect huge lottery-winning payoffs, the incentives for them to go after less definite or even frivolous cases will be much reduced. Supply and demand applies even in the legal system.
There is also the example of Texas, which after it capped damages, saw an influx of doctors and a huge drop in its health insurance premiums.
But again, more doctors and lower insurance costs did little or nothing to decrease healthcare spending:
Your cite talks only about Medicare, which is strongly affected by demographic factors. Who took the hit from lowered costs of private insurance - insurance companies?
No it doesn’t (plus, how much do you think demographic factors changed in years?)
Studies also show that actual malpractice cases far exceed the number of either court cases brought against them or awards. So maybe what this shows is that malpractice insurance should be socialised. That way doctors get cheaper premiums and there’d be more money to pay out to deserving cases.
But did it grow at the same rate as other states without the caps?
I read this next fact in Time magazine a while back but don’t have a cite for any of this.
Over the last 10 years the cost of claims paid by medical malpractice insurance companies went up about 10%. Over the same period the premiums about doubled.
I also believe that you spend most of your lifetime medical dollars in the last few months of your lifetime.
Health insurance companies spend over 20% of their premium income on administrative costs (underwriting, claims adjustment, etc.), medicare spends about 3%.
Doctors spend about 10% of their income dealing with multiple insurance companies.
At the margin, every dollar of medical treatment spent in an emergency room cold have been prevented by less than 10 cents worth of preventative care.
I guess what I’m saying is that there is a lot more efficeincy we can squeeze out of our helathcare system if we chose to do some squeezing.
People keep spouting this nonsense. This only works if you only count the costs of the person you are treating in the emergency room. So someone goes to the emergency room with a massive heart attack, and sure we could have tested and treated that person for high-cholesterol, high blood pressure and whatever else for 10% of the cost of treating the heart attack. But you would also have to treat the other 10, 20, 30 or 50 people who had the same risk profile, but never ended up having a heart attack.
False dilemma. Medical malpractice is neither an accident nor an intentional act. Rather, it is a failure to act reasonably in mitigating the chances of an accident. Examples of medical malpractice? Failing to read the chart before cutting up the wrong limb. Failing to check a drug interaction. Etc.
It is absolutely true that some medical malpractice litigation is frivolous. It is equally true that some of it is legitimate. But the ratio is nowhere near 99:1, and it is never the case that a mere accident is sufficient for liability (though perhaps sufficient for an insurance company to settle because they can just past the cost along).
Which are examples of accidents. People are fallible beasts. Best intentions aside, at some point you’re going to do something really stupid.
If you categorize everything into accident or intentional, I agree that they can be called “accidents.” But the law recognizes a third category–easily avoidable accidents: those accidents which are avoided by exercising reasonable care. My concern was simply that by using the term “accident,” you conflate both those accidents which are an inevitable consequence of medicine and those which are avoidable by following ordinary measures of carefulness.
It is not too much to ask, I don’t think, that a doctor check contraindications each time he administers a drug. The victim of this negligence should rightly receive compensation from the doctor. Plenty of other professions are held to the same standard, including lawyers.
I think of ‘accidents’ as things outside your control. Malpractice isn’t. It is in your control whether you read the chart and amputate. It is in your control whether you count the number of surgical pads that you used, and ensure none are left in the patient. If you don’t meet the standard of care expected, you have committed malpractice. That’s not an accident in the way most people think of the term, even if it isn’t a conscious choice to chop the wrong leg off or sew up a big pad inside of the patient’s chest cavity.