Too high a price
Amidei, Nancy
Medical malpractice TOO HIGH A PRICE PHYSICIANS & PATIENTS AT RISK SIGNS BEGAN appearing in upstate New York hospitals early this summer, warning that some of the doctors would take no new...
...We may soon find ourselves a nation that has licked its doctor shortage, but where it isn't safe to have a baby or an accident or anything seriously medically wrong, because there'll be nobody there to respond...
...So even when New York doctors paid premiums in amounts larger than most families' annual incomes, they weren't protected against lawsuits involving damages of $2 or $3 million...
...Professors on medical school faculties, for example, are apt to face lawsuits because they are more likely to get (and take) the most complicated cases...
...There are no doctors who will deliver babies on the Hawaiian island of Molokai...
...But just below the surface of this issue something else is at work...
...Some doctors are more vulnerable than others...
...This is one time when identifying the villains doesn't help much...
...Across the country, just finding a doctor willing to deliver babies is gradually becoming more difficult...
...Any surgery involves risk, but an appendectomy carries much less risk than delicate surgery on a brain tumor or spinal cord...
...But there is a price to be paid...
...While malpractice lawsuits may make lawyers and insurance companies rich, and doctors may have a tendency toward arrogance, juries are just being human when they give big awards to someone who is paralyzed or brain-damaged— no matter what the cause...
...One-fourth of the doctors specializing in obstetrics and gynecology in Florida and California no longer practice the "OB" side of their specialty...
...In every area of medicine, it is the high-risk patients who will have trouble getting care...
...in Lewistown, Maine, which used to have five practicing obstetricians, there now are only two...
...Delivering a baby when the mother is healthy, and trouble is not anticipated, is less problematic than attending a high-risk mother...
...As a nation, we have done a poor job of developing even minimally adequate services, income maintenance, and civil rights protection for disabled people...
...Around the nation, those lawsuits are determining the kind of medical care that is going to be available...
...So, whatever the members of a jury may think about a doctor's culpability, it often seems fairer to make an insurance company pay than to leave a family on its own...
...Medical malpractice TOO HIGH A PRICE PHYSICIANS & PATIENTS AT RISK SIGNS BEGAN appearing in upstate New York hospitals early this summer, warning that some of the doctors would take no new patients, and that certain of the medical specialties —like orthopedic or neuro-surgery—-would no longer be available to anyone...
...New state laws will help somewhat, but (in the view of those doctors who have chosen to move to other states) not entirely...
...And all of us are susceptible to feeling that modern medicine can fix anything...
...The ostensible reasons are the same in each case: the cost of medical malpractice insurance, and the threat of multi-million dollar lawsuits...
...When it doesn't, the doctor is often the handiest person to blame...
...Commonweal: 422...
...NANCY AMIDEI (Nancy Amidei writes regularly for Commonweal and is a commentator heard frequently on National Public Radio's All Things Considered...
...New York is a bit of a special case because insurance companies had limited coverage to $1 million until recently...
...In our society, there are no reasonable provisions for help...
...Juries award massive settlements because they know that the family of anyone who is brain-damaged or severely disabled will have to bear the costs largely on their own...
...Public programs like welfare or rehabilitation services are very limited, both in whom they help and what they provide, and 9 August 1985: 421 getting the necessary services privately is prohibitively expensive...
Vol. 112 • August 1985 • No. 14
