Wikipedia, where information is plentiful but dubious.
Oh. I get it. It went over my head. Very sly of you. FWIW, I called my mommy to double check some info I remembered from when my step-dad was alive. I offer it again, copying from another “tort reform” thread I was on today:
My step dad practiced over 50 years, some at a very well known, prestigious clinic. He was old school. He predicted back in the 80’s that greedy doctors would “break” medicare. He was right. He used to fuss about the “blood gas” tests getting run by all the doctors in the ER.
Several of his acquaintances, ran clinics where they would run thru hordes of little poor kids to get their tonsils out, or old poor men to get TURs.
He did not run a bunch of tests, only got sued once, and won that one.
parsifal’s mommy, was a nurse for years and years. She has had two botched surgeries. Both happened by doctors scheduling up to twelve surgeries per day. On the first one, she kept calling the doctor to see what could have gone wrong, because she knew something was wrong. The doctor did not know, denied anything was wrong, and kept brushing her off. The problem got a great deal worse. Finally she went to another doctor who was able to ameliorate the problem. When we met with the risk management person, he happened to mention that he had popped the symptoms into his computer and what had happened was blah blah blah.
I leapt. Why I asked then, if he a risk manager, who had never been to medical school could figure out what was wrong within a few minutes, could not the specialist who had done the surgery have done the same thing and kept the problem from getting worse? Was it because he was so busy doing 12 surgeries per day. (And not properly sterilizing his equipment because he was not leaving sufficient time between the surgeries.) Not having a good answer, it then became settlement time. I still remember the look on the risk managers face—all proud of himself for discovering the answer—and then turning to complete bumbling stupidity when he could not think of a good answer to the question.
parsifal’s mommy had back surgery recently. The first one, done by a friend, was botched. Again, the surgeon scheduled up to 12 surgeries per day. The surgeon who fixed it, told her on the QT that the first surgery had been botched and how. She didn’t make a claim. She could have, but lo and behold, the medical records had been either altered or phonied up. All sorts of post-op notes were in there allegedly doing all kinds of care, that hadn’t actually been done.
parsifal’s mommy, a feisty old woman, got p*ssed off when she found out she could not get two lipid tests in one year on medicare. Meanwhile, up the road, a doctor is running a “medicare penile implant” mill for old codgers. The doctor is running them thru left and right on medicare’s dime. She thought this somewhat unfair, wrote her congressmen and a well known conservative pundit. Nothing came of it.
My stepdad was right. Doctors are breaking medicare. Do the math. $240 billion maybe for doctors in defensive medicine costs, that do not seem to go down in “tort reformed” states, versus maybe $2 billion for greedy lawyers (40% of $4.5 billion).
Anyway, I posted that earlier. I am not “down” on doctors, I just think there needs to be a closer look at all their pleas to be protected from the suers and less histrionics about something that is LESS THAN ONE HALF PERCENT of total health care costs.
parsy, who does think lawyers should be protected from malpractice claims