Medical malpractice cases simply aren't going away. According to a March 3, 2003 article in BusinessWeek, the National Center for State Courts found that, despite tort reform, the national volume of medical malpractice cases filed has not changed over the last five years.

One factor contributing to the ongoing flood of litigation: Medical errors in hospitals kill up to 98,000 people each year, according to a 1999 study by the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine. That's 268 patients per day, or the equivalent of a fully loaded jumbo jet crashing every other day. This death toll is higher than the number of people who die from AIDS, breast cancer and car accidents combined. All of the legal nurse consultants I know would actually welcome a shortage of these cases.

Where's the Real "Crisis"?

Isn't this "attack on America" with so many people being killed in hospitals what we should be reforming? Instead of worrying about tort reform, we should be concerned about the Dark Ages of Healthcare perpetrated by managed care and the negligent providers who kill 268 hospital patients every day.

In spite of this boom in hospital "victims," according to the BusinessWeek article mentioned above, the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) reported that over the past ten years malpractice payouts have grown an average of only 6.2% per year. Yet the Journal of Health Affairs showed that the average rate of medical cost inflation over that same ten-year period was 6.7%. This doesn't sound like an explosion in malpractice awards to me.

We are not experiencing a crisis of litigation but a crisis of malpractice. The NPDB reported that from 1990 to 2002, 5% of U.S. doctors were responsible for 54% of medical malpractice payouts, including jury awards and out-of-court settlements. The NPDB breaks this down further: Of 35,000 doctors with two or more payouts during that period, only 8% were disciplined, and of the 2,774 doctors who made payments in at least five cases, only 463 were disciplined.

The severity of that "discipline" is open to question. On August 28, 2003, the Houston Chronicle reported on the case of a Houston doctor who had been sued 78 times and made payouts in 45 cases totaling more than $13.3 million. His punishment? The temporary suspension of his license. I find this especially appalling since I myself consulted on many cases against this doctor as far back as the early 1980s.