| 9/6/2006 9:12:00 AM | Email this article • Print this article | Malpractice battle lives on
Guest Opinion
by William A. Collins
Doc's procedure,
Came up short;
Can I even,
Go to court?
Like the semi-permanent trenches of World War I, battle lines over malpractice insurance rarely move. Here are some of the military units that remain deployed:
Black hats - The insurance companies are your basic villains. They make money by jacking up premiums for doctors and slashing payments to victims.
They lurk behind the annual crusade to limit awards for "pain and suffering" that go to injured patients. Because their stock market investments have been flagging of late, they try hard to appease Wall Street by raising rates to physicians.
HMOs - They don't want to know anything about victims. They just want to hold down payments to caregivers.
Grey hats - Doctors are surely dedicated to curing people, but they are likewise dedicated to making money. They mainly know malpractice rates have zoomed and they've heard from the insurance companies that it's all because of evil trial lawyers and frivolous lawsuits.
They panic at the idea of anyone finding out they've made a mistake. Thus, they band together in a silent pact not to tattle on one another, making damages for victims enormously difficult to collect.
The state - department of public health and the Medical Examiners' Board - simply want everybody to go away. They have no interest in keeping public records on errant doctors, criticizing anyone's performance or pulling licenses.
After all, they're mostly doctors themselves. Luckily, some signs of conscience are beginning to emerge there.
Beige hats - Trial lawyers, like the doctors, want to make a buck. Also like the docs, they enjoy the emotional reward of helping folks who really have been injured.
Not to say that a reprobate member of the bar here and there doesn't push a frivolous action, but there's little mileage in that.
Malpractice suits are enormously hard to win, so the much larger problem is that a perfectly valid injury lacks a sufficiently tidy set of evidence to win.
The lawyers then just won't take the case, emotional reward or not.
White hats - Victims are the poor souls who suffer. They're the ones who have to prove economic damages, prove pain, prove who did what to whom while they were unconscious, and surmount the medical "Wall of Silence."
Some come out fine if it's a clear-cut case, but many have their lives ruined with little or no compensation to show for it. They get little press, either.
Citizen groups - Because victims are normally too broke to fund an association themselves, the trial lawyers often foot the bill. This somewhat masks their financial interest, but the work of citizen groups, whatever their funding, seems noble compared to the moneyed interests.
Maximizing justice is always uplifting.
No hats - The legislature, like the doctors, wishes that malpractice would just go away. Who wants their office crowded alternately by white coats and crutches?
Lawmakers presumably don't have an ax to grind, and so can be reasonably judicious. So far, they have prudently held off payment caps on pain and suffering and are leaning toward tightening hospital infection controls. This is a long-term serialized drama.
Common sense would seem to suggest the wisdom of a no-fault system run by disinterested parties. You know, like for automobiles. Unfortunately, there are an awful lot of egos, CEOs, lawyers, and stockholders standing in the way.
Further, through time, such quasi-judicial panels tend to fall under the sway of one interest group or another. Guess we'll just have to keep on manning the trenches a little longer.
Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk, Conn. Column distributed by MinutemanMedia.org.
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