The Battle over Patient Rights and "Tort Reform" Begins Again

It is time for me to dust off my blog site and to begin again to post about patient rights. The new Republican Congress has wasted no time in renewing last year’s effort to enact draconian restrictions on the rights of negligently injured patients. In fact, the first new ‘tort reform” bill was introduced on the first day after the new Congress was sworn in and seeks to emasculate patient’s claims by arbitrarily limiting recovery of human suffering damages to $250,000 in all cases. It also seeks to make it more difficult for patients to obtain representation in their cases by severely limiting the contingency fees that attorneys can receive in medical malpractice cases. If the result of the amount you can potentially recover (if you are successful) and the contingency fees you can received (if you are successful) is that you will lose money even if you win, you simply cannot afford to represent the client regardless of the validity of his medical malpractice claim. The result is that the negligently injured patient is effectively denied his day in court to seek just compensation for the harm he has suffered.
But enough about what the new Republican Congress is trying to do. Maybe the best way to pick up on where we left off last year is to remember why medical malpractice lawsuits exist. The lawsuits exist because patients continuie to be badly hurt due to poor medical care. The medical malpractice lawsuits provide the means for injured patients to seek fair compensatation for the harm they have suffered and, by compensating them, an incentive for the health care industry to do a better job by holding them accountablefor their poor medical care.

Hospital Safety Still an Issue: Better Medical Care, Not Tort Reform, Is the Answer

Whether for a check-up, injury or major surgery, we expect to leave the hospital in better shape than when we arrived. Unfortunately, a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine, is the latest in a series of reports which clearly demonstrates that efforts to improve the safety of our hospitals are failing and poor medical care in the hospital is resulting in countless injuries and numerous deaths each year. The problem in health care costs is not unnecessary and groundless medical malpractice lawsuits. Instead, it is the poor medical care that is continuing to needlessly harm a significant number of patients each year.
The most recent study examined 10 North Carolina hospitals from 2002 to 2007. Records of over 2,300 patients were reviewed at the hospitals during this five year period and researchers uncovered 588 incidents of medical mistakes that resulted in harm to patients. The types of adverse events resulting from medical mistakes varied and included injuries such as falls, low blood pressure, excessive bleeding during surgery and, most commonly, hospital-acquired infections.
A significant portion of the errors were severe. Forty three percent of the adverse events uncovered by the researchers required an extended stay in the hospital. In just over eight percent of the cases, the adverse events were life threatening and in 2.4 percent of the cases, the mistakes caused or contributed to the patient’s death, according to an analysis of the study in The New York Times.
Also of interest was the fact that the researchers did not find a statistically significant decrease in hospital errors over the life of the five year study and instead noted “little evidence of widespread improvement.”
Though the NEJM study focused on one geographic region, the authors of the study were not expecting that other areas of the country were faring any better. In fact, the research notes that North Carolina was selected as the focus of the study because of its “high level of engagement” in efforts to improve patient safety. What this suggests is that , if anything, the extent of medical mistakes and patient harm in hospitals in other parts of our country is likely worse than what the study found.
The New York Times report notes this study is the largest attempt to quantify hospital safety improvement since the Institute of Medicine’s 1999 report. That 1999 report is the one that concluded that hospital errors were injuring one million people and causing 98,000 deaths annually.
Now is not the time to curtail the rights of injured patients. Instead, we should be using our efforts and resources to improve the quality of patient care and let improved care and reduced medical mistakes effectively lower the need for medical malpractice litigation.