March 21–28, 2002
slant
Medical Emergency
On the steps of the state capitol earlier this year, Dr. William West, an obstetrician and gynecologist, told Pennsylvanians how a personal-injury lawyer dragged him into a frivolous lawsuit while he was the chief resident at Lankenau Hospital. After seven years of depositions, interrogatories, hours away from helping patients and a $40,000 bill, a judge dismissed him from the case.
Dr. Nancy Roberts, system chairman of the Main Line Health Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, also shared horror stories resulting from the state’s out-of-control legal system. During the past 18 months, 30 percent of obstetricians/gynecologists in one of her hospitals left the state or stopped delivering babies. Roberts herself gave up delivering babies due to astronomical costs of liability insurance.
Others shared similar stories.
Pennsylvania faces a serious crisis. It’s a very complicated situation, and it’s one that the Pennsylvania Medical Society says requires many different professions to step up and play a role in fixing. For nearly 15 months, the medical society has called upon three key areas to be addressed. Those areas include patient safety, CAT fund and lawsuit-abuse reform.
Great progress has been made in the area of patient safety. Pennsylvanians can connect to the Internet and visit licensepa.state.pa.us to see if their doctors have had any disciplinary actions against them. Also, medical errors are decreasing. In fact, according to the most recent scientific study of medical errors, it’s likely that medical errors are not even in the top 20 causes of death in the United States. A patient in Gettysburg, Pa., recently sent a letter to the editor of a Harrisburg newspaper stating that his independent investigation using the National Vital Statistics Reports found that deaths due to adverse effects of medical care was ranked 72nd, a far cry from misleading advertisements that personal-injury lawyers are running.
However, as patient-safety improvements are made, liability insurance costs have not dropped. Instead, they continue to rise. Lawsuit abuse must be our next fix because it is doing great harm to quality patient care.
Spurred by the state’s legal system, runaway insurance rates are forcing doctors to cut back. They have less money to invest in new medical equipment, are forced to close smaller branch offices, and must trim office staff. The upshot is a downswing in available health care services.
A recent survey by the Pennsylvania Medical Society supports this. According to the report, 72 percent of doctors surveyed said they have deferred buying new medical equipment or hiring new staff due to sudden increases in liability insurance.
On the heels of a 21 percent to 60 percent rate hike in 2001, liability insurance carriers requested similar increases for 2002 before the events of Sept. 11.
Driving premiums through the roof are excessive sums awarded in malpractice suits. Pennsylvania is the second-worst state in the country for total payouts for medical malpractice. During the fiscal year 2000, combined judgments and settlements in Pennsylvania amounted to $352 million — or nearly 10 percent of the national total.
Philadelphia juries lead the state in jury awards. From January 1994 through August 2001, the median jury award in Philadelphia for a medical-malpractice case was $972,909. For the rest of the state, including Pittsburgh, the median was $410,000.
To make matters worse, according to data from the Physicians Insurers Association of America, nearly 70 percent of all medical-malpractice claims made against doctors do not result in a payment to the plaintiff. In other words, there are too many meritless claims being made. Furthermore, only 1.3 percent of all claims made against a doctor result in a jury award to the plaintiff. Personal-injury lawyers want you to believe that their 70 percent error rate is acceptable. We call it a crime.
It’s no wonder that liability insurance costs are skyrocketing. Or that more doctors are hanging up their coats.
There’s even more bad news for the public — and the business community that pays for employee health insurance.
To fend off litigation and cope with steep liability premiums, doctors ultimately are being forced to practice defensive medicine. According to a nationwide study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics , defensive medicine costs an additional $50 billion per year.
Defensive medicine drives up health care costs and ultimately health-insurance premiums.
Clearly, lawsuit abuse is bogging down the health care you receive.
Pennsylvanians can sit back, believe the false advertisements by personal-injury lawyers, and do nothing. But that won’t preserve access to health care. Now is the time to act. Patients and doctors: preserve the relationship.
Roger F. Mecum is executive vice president of the Pennsylvania Medical Society. If you would like to respond to this Slant or have one of your own (850 words), contact Howard Altman, City Paper interim editor, 123 Chestnut St., Phila., PA 19106 or e-mail altman@citypaper.net.
