Patients’ Rights and Reform

“Health Care Reform Can’t wait.”  “Health Costs:   No Quick Fix.”  “Health-Care Reform Proposals Are No Cure-All.”  Headlines like these are splashed on the front pages of newspapers across the country as a new president and Congress work to insure 46 million uninsured citizens.

The costs of obesity, pharmaceutical drugs, and Medicare are all part of the discussion as to what is contributing to the high cost of health care in  this country.

But what has become abundantly clear in all of the statistics and chatter is that taking away the rights of patients to recover for medical malpractice is not the solution.  Missing from the headlines is the fact that malpractice litigation plays a minuscule part, accounting for an estimated 0.6 percent of health care costs.

In order to make health care affordable and available, a bigger picture needs to be examined.  As Congress tries to hammer out a bill to tackle this enormous problem, Americans are seeing that it is a costly, complicated enigma that requires the greatest minds to solve.

Nevertheless, business and insurance industries have been pushing for caps on damages in medical malpractice cases for years, contending that it would solve the rising cost of health care.  And now the truth comes out that, although health care is a complicated mess, patients who seek compensation for their injuries caused by their providers’ negligent care is not the problem.

Attacking trial lawyers was merely a tactic of the industry’s greed.

This is not to say that America’s doctors aren’t impacted by the fact that medical malpractice premiums have increased over the years despite a decrease in the number of lawsuits and settlement amounts.

That requires an examination of the insurance industry, something that is underway in Illinois.

President Obama was brave when he stood in front of doctors in June at the Annual Meeting of the American Medical Association amid jeers, telling them that tort reform is not the answer.

As the president of the American Association for Justice, Les Weisbrod, said, following Obama’s remarks, “According to the Institute of Medicine, 98,000 people die every year because of medical errors.  Eliminating these errors, not further hurting the victims of negligence, is where lawmakers should focus their attention.   By taking away the rights of people to hold wrongdoers accountable, the quality of health care will suffer tremendously.”

The reaction of some doctors to Obama’s speech was that they should not be sued for their mistakes.  Some even went so far as to write op-ed pieces claiming that they should not be held accountable because” the individual doctor knows best,” and based upon the “supposition of physician supremacy,...[i]t also follows that if the physician is king, then no one else of lesser rank can reign.”  (Dr. Joseph Cramer, The Deseret Morning News, Salt Lake City, Utah, July 18, 2009).

Whatever happened to accountability?  Does accepting responsibility for one’s careless actions apply to medical malpractice?  Is anyone else exempt from accountability in this country?  Why are doctors to be treated any differently?

Certainly they went to medical school and are to be commended for studying long and hard to become healers of the sick.  Society could not function without them, but that doesn’t make them gods or kings.

Blaming patients for doctors doing preventive tests is also not the answer.  First, it must be noted that most preventive tests are very necessary and actually reduce the cost of health care.  For example, colonscopies starting at the age of 50 have detected early and treatable colon cancer.

Those who have Stage I cancer are much more likely to be saved than those in Stage IV, and the cost of treating those in the later stages is staggeringly more expensive.   But even if we’re talking about X-rays, MRIs, EKGs, and blood tests, they can be life-saving measures if taken, not if avoided.

Furthermore, it is clear that not all preventive tests are unnecessary or duplicative.  Preventive tests are part of a doctor’s protocol in diagnosing the problem.

Other tests may be simply for the purpose of increasing the doctor’s bottom line.  Can one really discern where necessary tests end and unnecessary ones begin?  The system needs a way to sort this out.

At this writing, at least four bills, one of them more than 1,000 pages long, are pending in Congress, focusing on valid priorities:

    ∙    protecting the doctor-patient relationship

    ∙    lowering health care costs

    ∙    expanding health insurance coverage

    ∙    fair reimbursement of doctors for treating Medicare and Medicaid patients

    ∙    giving patients some options

    ∙    improving the quality of health care

With a $2.5 trillion price tag for health expenses this year, what is really going on is rearranging finances to make it work better for more people, and then allowing the government to deliver what it is promising.  A bill is expected to be passed by the year’s end, and hopefully it will help more than it will hurt.