After all the talk of Congress holding corporate America accountable to their employees and you the consumer, our president gave a speech in North Carolina in July advocating severe limits on patients' rights to sue for malpractice. He said unnecessary litigation has created a health-care crisis in America.
At the same time, Tom Brokaw was on the nightly news warning the public of the increase in bacterial infections running rampant in our nation's hospitals. He said hundreds of patients were getting hospital infections and many of them were dying every year from these infections.
According to our local newspapers, the health community is also laying blame on the legal system for high medical malpractice premiums. We have heard scare tactics telling Utah's expectant mothers that they will not be able to find a doctor to care for them because of the high malpractice premiums their OB/GYN doctor has to pay. We are being told the doctors will leave and go to another state, retire or do gynecology only.
Are lawsuits for medical malpractice really the reason for insurance premiums increasing 30 percent in Utah? What is really going on? Does it have anything to do with greedy and mismanaged insurance companies?
The Utah Citizens Alliance has a binder full of information on this same subject gathered from the 1980s, again blaming the legal system for increased insurance premiums and calling for tort reform. It sounds like it was hot off the press yesterday!
Each time insurance rates begin to skyrocket and professionals complain, the insurance industry tries to cover up its mismanaged and risky business practices by blaming lawyers and the legal system, even though lawyers and the legal system are clearly not to blame.
Legislators often succumb to insurance industry pressure rather than focusing on real solutions caused by the cyclical nature of the insurance business. There is very little scrutiny of what's really going on by policyholders, lawmakers, the media or the public.
One of our local newspapers noted the Utah Medical Insurance Association had declined to answer questions about their rising rates this year to Utah's physicians. Could it be that the UMIA's own Web site shows there is not a problem with too many medical malpractice lawsuits in Utah? The UMIA opened 394 new claims for medical malpractice and closed 380 claims during the year 2000. Of the claims closed, 32 percent involved a settlement payment to patients; 68 percent closed without a payment to the patient! Of the closed claims in 2000, five went to trial and all returned verdicts in favor of the physician. The cost to defend these five claims was $637,600. The average cost for the five claims was $127,500 with the low being $34,900 and the high at $213,000.
If lawsuits aren't the problem, why is the medical community crying for more tort reform to bring their medical malpractice insurance rates down? It seems big insurance companies are willing to make their problems your problem. Insurance companies have even scared some people into fighting their battle for them, like doctors, patients, homeowners and small businesses. Insurers tell doctors it is the fault of the legal system, so the solution is for the doctors to go to their legislatures and seek restrictions on the rights of their patients.
Insurers have imposed huge rate hikes on businesses and professionals, like doctors, three times in the past 30 years. The cause is always the same: a severe drop in investment income for the insurance company compounded by under-pricing in prior years. The great stock market growth of the 1990s was giving insurance companies great returns for their investments. Now, the stock market falls and poor insurance management has to be making up the difference somewhere out of someone else's pocket. This pattern repeats itself every 10 or 12 years and the legal system is always blamed!
Insurance companies and big businesses don't like lawsuits. They would prefer not to be responsible or accountable to the American public. They are willing to spend big money and exert all their influence on state and national legislators to change our legal system. They say, falsely, that we must make it even harder or impossible for Americans to use our civil courts in order to bring down insurance rates.
Restricting legal rights, while having terrible consequences for many innocent people, will do nothing to improve the affordability of liability insurance. The law is there to protect the injured, not to shield those who caused their injuries.
Ed Miezwinski, consumer program director for the U.S. Interest Research Group, based in Washington, D.C., stated last month: "We always knew that jury verdicts were not the cause of rising insurance premiums. It's not the juries that are out of control, but rather the powerful insurance companies that are trying to manipulate the system."
The problem with malpractice is malpractice. More than 98,000 people die each year as a result of preventable medical mistakes, and we should work to cure that problem rather than punish the victims. If we really want to punish the lawyers, let's make hospitals less dangerous.
Corporate responsibility and accountability should not be for a chosen few. That accountability must extend to insurance and medical corporations alike, and the public should see that it does.
LaRee Miller is executive director of Utah Citizens Alliance for Safety & Accountability, a nonprofit advocacy organization based in Salt Lake City.