White House Announces Grant to Help States Reduce Medical Malpractice Lawsuits; Theodoros & Rooth believes that Reform Should Be Aimed At Increasing Patient Safety
He might have meant it as a standard operating procedures to placate health care reform opponents, but so far, there is little to indicate that President Obama’s proposal to grant funds to states to help cut down on medical malpractice lawsuits, has huge support.
Last week, the administration announced that it would grant $25 million to states and health care agencies to evaluate means of reducing the number of "frivolous" lawsuits. According to the White House, the money must be used to help identify and evaluate alternative measures that can minimize such lawsuits. For instance, some states have been flirting with proposals that will allow doctors and hospitals to admit errors and apologize for these, to avoid a lawsuit. States would be encouraged to evaluate the success of such measures, and adopt these.
If the President intended to bring both sides of the debate to speak in a single voice, he succeeded, but not in the way he'd probably hoped. The announcement has been criticized by Republicans and tort reform advocates, as well as patient safety groups. Opponents believe that the grants are too small a step to impact what they like to call, an "epidemic" of medical malpractice lawsuits in the country. Patient safety advocates believe that the grants will do nothing to win support for Obama's reforms, and may actually compromise the rights of injured patients to seek justice.
As Indiana medical malpractice lawyers, we have to agree that the vitriol against justice for injured patients and medical malpractice lawyers in the name of tort reform, is not going to dissipate because of these funds.
The fact is that malpractice insurance in this country has barely little to do with inflating healthcare costs. In fact, according to the Congressional Budget Office, medical malpractice payouts only account for about 2 percent of healthcare costs in the country, and that’s a fact.
The $25 million will do little to raise overall quality and care at some of our worst hospitals, and prevent the kind of wrong diagnoses, surgical errors, emergency room errors and other medical mistakes that are responsible for these lawsuits in the first place.
Theodoros & Rooth believes that the best form or Tort Reform is to institute reforms aimed at cutting down on the number of patient deaths and injuries, which have been estimated to be as high as 100,000 per year.
