Medical Negligence/Who are the Victims
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This past week, I attended an Injury Board conference. I enjoyed meeting member lawyers from other parts of the country. One of the persitent laments during the week was the increasing difficulty in bringing legitimate medical negligence cases on behalf of injured victims as the result of restrictive caps on damages and other legislative intiatives masquerading as "tort reform".
What we must do to educate the public is make them aware that "reform" means nothing more than deprivation of rights, the rights of the victim. There is nothing more painful to a plaintiffs attorney than telling a client that has suffered an injury as the result of medical negligence that they don't have a case because the economics of this area of practice don't allow it to be viable. When we explain to the client the law in the jurisdiction, the economics of the case, the costs involved in bringing the case, and why it all doesn't add it, the inevitable response from the client is "how did this happen."
It happened because insurers successfully convinced legislators that the losses they suffered were the fault of "the lawyers" and the "greedy victims" . The investment losses they suffered as the result of the stock market, bad derivative investments or other administrative foibles were blamed on the bad "trial lawyers" and their clients.
Unfortunately, there is another set of victims...and they are the responsible physicians. The insurers and the HMOs have so perverted our health care system that the vast majority of physicians that are not responsible for most of the negligence that occurs in this country work ridiculous hours and provide less than optimal care because they must bow at the altar of the insurance companies and HMO admistrators. People that are not physicians make health care decisions that must be adhered to by doctors. Insurance companies have brewed a sour concoction of a system that serves neither patients or doctors.
Rather than being legitimately "reformed", the system has become a nightmare. There are multiple victims, including the injured patient that has no judicial recourse. The "tort reformers" can blame the trial lawyers all they want, but their attention ought to be focused on the cooks that made the brew.