Medical Professionals and Patients
Lawsuit abuse drives up medical costs, limits access
Looking for what to do next? Find out at the end of this article.
The plaintiffs’ bar wants the public to believe that its lawyers are patient’s best friends. But the truth is, they are a threat to patients’ health, having created a crisis in the medical care delivery system by filing a stream of unwarranted malpractice lawsuits.
Not all medical malpractice lawsuits are frivolous or abusive. Some are necessary to fairly compensate plaintiffs who are injured by doctors through negligence or incompetence. But too many are simply the product of greedy lawyers and plaintiffs looking for a jackpot.
Over the years, lawsuits against doctors have skyrocketed. The result has been an unhealthy increase in medical malpractice insurance premiums. When the Congressional Budget Office studied the issue in 2004, it found that “On average, premiums for all physicians nationwide rose by 15 percent between 2000 and 2002 – nearly twice as fast as total health care spending per person.”
Doctors across the country are giving up their practices, moving to other states or discontinuing high-risk treatments. It’s not because they have grown tired of medicine or don’t care for their surroundings. They just want to work where they can practice the healing arts without going broke.
Pennsylvania’s “Extreme Crisis” in Healthcare – Plenty of Lawyers, Not Enough Physicians
One example of this exodus can be found in Pennsylvania.
Because of the state’s liberal medical liability laws, more than 10,000 lawsuits have been filed against doctors there since 2002. Of those, the Pennsylvania Medical Board found that only 73 had “merit.” Yet since 2003, Pennsylvania juries have awarded more than $2 billion to plaintiffs who sued physicians.
Instead of a state filled with satisfied plaintiffs, Pennsylvania is instead home to among the highest medical malpractice insurance rates in the nation. The Harvard School of Public Health designated the state as one having an “extreme-level” of medical liability crisis in 2005.
As a consequence of the hostile legal climate and the high insurance rates, a shortage of doctors has arisen in Pennsylvania as more than 3,000 physicians have left the state. The damage includes at least seven preventable deaths in the suburban Philadelphia county of Chester, where there are no longer any full-time emergency neurosurgeons An additional 11 preventable deaths, perhaps more, have resulted from the lack of neurosurgeons in the greater Philadelphia area. Soaring liability costs – the average individual Philadelphia obstetrician currently pays between $130,000 and $200,000 in malpractice insurance premiums per year – have led to the closure of 14 maternity units in the Philadelphia area over the last decade, as well.
“Clearly, we’re dealing with a frivolous lawsuit environment, and it’s taking a critical toll on health care access,” said Dr. James Tayoun, a founding member of the Pennsylvania-based Patients and Physicians Alliance, an advocacy organization made up of more than 6,000 physician members in the region. “This is one of the ultimate quality of life issues.”
Guess Who Pays Litigation Price for Health Care? You Do!
The doctors who don’t flee have to somehow recoup the expense of their exorbitant insurance premiums. They have little choice but to forward the costs to their patients or the companies that cover them. In some instances, employers, particularly small- to mid-size companies, faced with steep increases in health insurance premiums, are forced to drop health insurance coverage for their employees. For many, that is the better option than cutting back on the number of workers or moving to a state where doctors have some protections from freewheeling lawsuits.
Doctors are not the only professionals walking away from health care. The insurance companies that provide medical malpractice coverage are leaving markets in states where they are most likely to have to cover multi-million dollar jury awards and settlements in medical liability suits. Some carriers have gone bankrupt.
In the markets where the insurance companies continue to provide coverage, they often have to raise the costs of premiums to offset their losses or stop writing malpractice policies. The St. Paul Companies, once the largest malpractice carrier in the country, covering 9 percent of doctors, left the malpractice market in 2002. That decision, forced by nearly $1 billion in losses, left 42,000 doctors without insurance and many more patients than that without a physician. Pennsylvania has nearly all of its malpractice insurers and Mississippi more than 15 since 1997.
Too Many Tests, Not Enough Treatment: Treating Patients By Lawsuit
The proliferation of medical liability lawsuits has driven up costs in another way: the advent of defensive medicine. To cut their risks of being sued, physicians are increasingly ordering unnecessary tests, adding to the expense of treatment with no related increase in health benefits.
Eight in 10 physicians say they have ordered more tests than are medically necessary; roughly a quarter have referred patients to specialists more often than they believed was needed; half have recommended invasive procedures such as biopsies to confirm diagnoses when the ordinarily would not have; and four in 10 say they prescribe more medications than they would have ordered based only on their professional judgment.
It’s estimated that the practice of defensive medicine adds roughly $124 billion a year to total health care costs. Another $30 billion is spent to defend malpractice cases, pay compensation, and cover additional administrative costs. According to Dr. Stuart L. Weinstein, chairman of the Orthopaedic Political Action Committee, the average American family pays an additional $1,700 to $2,000 per year in health care costs simply to cover the costs of defensive medicine.
What does all this mean to patients?
In many cases it means a lack of health care access, restrictions on choice, curbs on innovations and improvements, and a declining standard of care. It also means that medical treatment is unaffordable for many, a rising financial burden for others, and that the numbers of uninsured patients increases as the price of coverage grows, forced up by risings costs.
It means, as well, that we live in a time that is so litigious that many hotels have chosen to not place lifesaving heart defibrillators on their properties because they fear being sued for “for failing to have enough units, failing to put them in the right places, or failing to replace batteries or maintain them properly,” says the Wall Street Journal.
The statistics are alarming. As demonstrated in Pennsylvania, the legal conditions have brought an increase in preventable deaths. Across the country, the Pacific Research Institute estimates, more than 114,000 Americans would be alive and working today if it weren’t for the inefficiencies in the tort system over the last two decades. Anyone seeing a doctor or anyone who will in the future should have a intense interest in seeing policymakers make rational changes to tort law.
Now What Do We Do?
Foundation for Fair Civil Justice (FFCJ) exists to bring empowering programs and education to medical patients and medical service professionals.
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Bob is a bestselling author and founder of the nationally profiled “Wacky Warning Label Contest,” which annually picks the wackiest warning labels on products to underscore the absurd lengths to which American business has to go in response to the threat of lawsuits.
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