There is a raging epidemic of medical incompetence and malpractice in this country, but as the national debate over health care intensifies, the most powerful elements of the health-care industry are engaged in a cruel and sinister campaign to limit the legal rights of malpractice victims.
Lobbyists for doctors, hospitals, the insurance industry and others claim that they are fighting on behalf of malpractice "reform," but that is not so.True reform would be an effort to prevent malpractice. This so-called reform effort is geared solely toward preventing victims (or their survivors) from collecting the damages they deserve for the dreadful injuries they have suffered.
The carnage from malpractice is astonishing. If you add up all the deaths each year from crime, from motor vehicle accidents and from fires, they will not equal the estimated 80,000 people who die in hospitals annually from some form of medical negligence or malpractice.
Scores of thousands of patients each year are left paralyzed, brain-damaged, blind or otherwise horribly disabled from malpractice. Most are never adequately compensated.
The health-care bill that emerged from the Senate Finance Committee was particularly egregious in its approach to malpractice victims. That bill would put a $250,000 cap on damages that could be awarded for pain and suffering; would limit attorneys' fees for plaintiffs (but not for defendants), and would have required that 75 percent of all punitive damages go to the state, not the plaintiff.
Those are insidious proposals, and they are still making the rounds in Congress. Caps on pain and suffering hurt the people most vulnerable to low-quality care - women, the elderly and low-income people.
There is no cap on compensation for lost income, which is a significant measure of protection for wealthy victims of malpractice. But others, without the cushion of wealth, would be limited to the maximum of $250,000 for even a lifetime of suffering.
Medical representatives have complained for years that malpractice suits have been a major factor in the surge of health-care costs. It is a bogus argument.
Doctors, on average, spend 2.9 percent of their gross income on malpractice insurance, just a shade over the 2.3 percent they pay for "professional car upkeep."
Meanwhile, the insurance companies are cleaning up. Figures from 1991 showed that malpractice policies earned the companies $1.4 billion in profits.
But medical malpractice victims are not cleaning up. Only one out of 16 victims gets anything in the way of compensation. Many refuse to sue because they don't want to fight the phalanx of doctors who are sure to come to the aid of the defendant.