As an officer of the court, I’d expect more care with the facts. Where did anyone claim that all lawyers are to be called ambulance chasers? Seems to me that @gavin was careful to write the opposite, viz.,
Never let the facts interfere with a good smear, eh?
You do not like me, DrL
The reason why, I cannot tell.
I am guessing that one of the consequences of malpractice is that it provides an advantage to grouping.
In a large hospital does each doctor get their own insurance or does the hospital negotiate a plan that covers all their employees? If it is the second, then becoming a large organization is a benefit financially.
It is an awful deal for the doctors because some villain dreamed up the idea of “claims made” insurance. As the industry actually brags: you aren’t buying coverage, you’re just renting it! They will insure the hospital and its employees like interns and residents for one year for, say, a million dollar premium. But, it only covers claims made during that one year (and you have to disclose any incidents which occurred before the inception of coverage, which they will then exclude) . If someone gets injured during that year, it’s unlikely the claim will be made during that year, since the statute of limitations is 2 years. So they cancel after one year, risk free!
And the doctor whose one-year tenure is over? He or she can be charged…oh, whatever the insurance co wants for a “tail”… it is effing brilliant.
The bottom line: claims-made insurance isn’t really insurance. But increasingly, , it’s all you can get. Occurrence-based insurance is so over.
GOD I hate those bozos!
I think your comments about insurance companies reflects a defect that is taken advantage by bad actors.
A company regardless of its business is a legal construct. It doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t make decisions. Thinking corporations have agency allows them to be blamed without the same sense of fairness normally applied to humans.
Do you think the insurance companies somehow attract evil people?
People operate based on incentives and disincentives. Anytime competition is reduced there is more incentive to treat your customer badly. Those that voted for Obamacare, voted for something that reduced competition. They told us we would have to find out what was in the bill after it was passed and we did. In South Dakota all insurance companies stopped offering health insurance. You can now buy insurance from either of the two hospitals companies that exist in the State.
Health care was a cost problem before Obamacare and the solution to a cost problem was to reduce competition and force the companies that sell insurance to cover pre-existing conditions which drives up costs for everyone. Healthcare is still a cost problem.
How you pay for a cost doesn’t impact the cost. How you make a rent payment doesn’t change the amount owed. Seems real simple because it is real simple. The insurance company can only impact the costs of its operations. I don’t believe they are super inefficient in how they do their business and certainly not intentionally because if they can reduce the cost of operations in only makes the financial performance.
Thus, the focus of a cost problem should be on costs. Are the hospitals, doctors and nurses evil because healthcare is costly?
What we might find is that we can spend more money than we have out of feelings. This is where feelings meets reality. There is always waste in a system, but in healthcare we have the capability to spend way more than all of us combined can afford even without waste.
When we believe, like we do as a nation, that things are free or that if we just take the wealthy’s money we can pay for anything, we delude ourselves allowing our feels dominate reality.
Putting the blame on a thing that is legal construct allows us to avoid facing the reality and allows the system to degrade further by people thinking mother government will make it all better because it cut out the payment system. I am sure Medicare for all will result in a very bad outcome for the average person.
Looking at medical malpractice insurance sensibly, the obvious answer is that it is totally unnecessary and should be done away with.
If a doctor or nurse commits malpractice, then those human beings should lose their licenses to practice medicine. That’s it! That’s all!
The patient who was injured by a medical procedure gone wrong is just out of luck. Bad things happen in this world, despite the best efforts of many people. If a person wants to avoid the risk of medical malpractice, then that person should reject the medical treatment and live with the consequences. But all patients will know that incompetent medical professionals are being ruthlessly drummed out of medicine, meaning that there is an excellent chance the doctors who treat them will do the best job humanly possible.
Of course, there is a fatal flaw in this proposal, even though it would improve medical treatment and substantially reduce costs – there would be nothing in it for the legal profession; lots of “ambulance chasers” might have to find real productive societally-useful jobs. I think that would make them better people.
Just have to drop this into the conversation – I checked my e-mail and have received an unsolicited e-mail from “bloodcancerlawsuits.com” – with a mailing address in Washington DC, of course.
Title of the e-mail:
“Blood Cancer Lawsuits: Settlements Billions Awarded: See if you qualify”
And we wonder why medicine in the US costs twice what it does in other countries? How can rich lawyers look at themselves in the mirror and not feel shame?
Ruthlessly drummed out of medicine? You mean like this guy?
At least in California, doctors are independent contractors not hospital employees.
I remember this because of the state law banning 1099s didn’t apply to lawyers and doctors and other hospital employees (2019 is the year IIRC)
Oh, dear. I don’t know you so I can neither like nor dislike you. However, I dislike your arguments and your uneasy relationship with facts.
Everything is personal to you, isn’t it.
ProPublica. lol
Verified as liars.
I can’t quite agree with your drastic reform. There’s still room for redress for bad behavior. I don’t know enough about medical malpractice to suggest specific reforms. Maybe something along the lines of capping awards and eliminating punitive damages (assuming there are any).
@caddzooks said that he only uses highly ranked highly unbiased sources 
As long as the camel’s nose of any legal action is sticking under the medical tent, doctors will be forced to practice “defensive medicine” (putting up costs for all of us), and insurance companies will be forced to charge high premiums (putting up the costs for all of us).
Take away the incentive for greedy lawyers to grow fat on others’ distress, and the quality of medical care will improve while the costs go down.
Yes, a few patients may suffer – but life is inherently unfair. Why were we all not born with the looks of Robert Redford in his prime, the golf playing abilities of a Tiger Woods, and the intellect of an Einstein? Under the current lawyer-friendly medical system, every patient suffers.
“Uneasy relationship with the facts”…that is libelous, sir. Thank you for putting up a graph which illustrates my point, though. Y’know, if you kinda stand back and squint at it….Big picture.
If you want to,post a snarky insulting reply, have at it! Whatever you post will be the last word; I have a delightful holiday luncheon waiting. Merry Christmas!
Right. Straight from X, the cesspool of rumor and innuendo.
It would seem to me that you’re simply propagating that rumor, with no basis in fact or evidence, just like the fake election.
Who said West Point lied? Where’s the proof of that? They said that it was a mistake in their records search. Oh, well of course they’re lying about that too, right?
Another A-hole in the same thread said that the drones over our heads here in Jersey are from Iran. Well, that thread might be good for a few laughs but that’s about it.
My lawyer once told me, if you can’t prove it, don’t say it.
Learn to use a search engine. Until then, STFU.
It’s not only healthcare. After decades of paying a hefty premium to insure our property, we had a disastrous year. One building froze, then when that was repaired, the furnace caught fire! Oh, our insurance co paid—and the next year, they raised our premium by pretty much what they had paid. Of course we wanted to change companies but the industry shares information— nobody would insure us for less. So where’s the risk they take? The entire industry is rotten.
It’s not libel if it’s true.
You didn’t bother to read the text of the post, didja. I acknowledged that there was a small decline that was somewhat underestimated because it is not corrected for inflation. Even if the decline were 20%, that still means 80% of the costs remain. Furthermore, there are other costs not captured by the total payments, which I will repeat below for your benefit.
We had a good year last year – yet another year without a claim on property insurance. And yet our property insurance also jumped a staggering amount.
Apparently, although those low-profit insurance companies always get the blame, the real blame attaches to – you guessed it! – those willfully ignorant Greens and Lefties.
Starting years ago, they shut down sensible forest management programs. As a result, the national forests became overgrown, and forest fires resulted, which in turn caused very heavy property damage in many locations in the country. Because insurance is essentially a pooling of costs, those unexpectedly high fire losses elsewhere have put up home insurance for everyone.
As so often happens, the root of the problem is government, doing what it should not or failing to do what it should.