« Cleveland Has Sunk Lower Than L.A. | Main | What France Should Really Be Worried About »
February 20, 2003
Medical Tort Reform
The other day I read through a long rant by a liberal about how President Bush's tort reform proposal is wrong-headed. At the end of laborious cant that will not be reproduced here, he concluded with the following suggestions for enacting "real reform."
- . Restrictions on the number of hours worked by health care professionals since fatigue is a documented cause of errors. Truckers are restricted to the number of hours they drive, but medical interns and residents can work over 100 hours per week.
. Hospitals and other health care providers must institute meaningful risk prevention programs and report all errors to a central databank... This information must be made public if errors and costs are to be reduced. Patients will have the information to avoid selecting bad doctors and other doctors will have it to avoid referring patients to those who are guilty of malpractice.
. Computerize records, especially those concerning doctor's orders and medications, to track and reduce human errors.
. Require state medical boards to establish and maintain effective peer review committees to investigate all complaints and discipline doctors as needed. Data from the NPDB reveals that 5.1 percent of doctors in the United States account for 54.2 percent of the number of malpractice payouts - physicians that have accumulated two or more malpractice payouts. It also points out that only 7.6 percent of those doctors with two or more payouts have been disciplined. Of those with five or more payouts, only13.3 percent have been disciplined and of those with 10 or more payouts, only 32.1 percent have received any disciplinary action. This is outrageous. Most of these doctors are still practicing on an unsuspecting public.
. Require that doctors obtain mandatory continuous education in their fields of practice and that they be recertified periodically based on independent written, clinical, and oral examinations.
. Demand that insurers rate doctors on performance when establishing malpractice premiums, charging more for those disciplined and decertifying those with numerous malpractice payouts.
. Direct insurers to create larger risk pools by reducing the number of classifications of specialties; thereby, spreading the risk over a larger number of participants.
Ironically, there used to be a private sector corporation that supplied information to the public about which doctors were good and which should be avoided. It was a annual report labeled "Best Doctors" or something like that. I believe the company responsible decided to shutdown publication after getting paid off (or perhaps threatened) by the AMA.
(P.S. Credit should go to the liberal author, but I somehow have misplaced his name!)
Posted by crandal at February 20, 2003 10:37 PM