Posted on 04/08/2002 12:07:09 PM PDT by jwalburg
Doctors close offices in protest
Associated Press
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EDINBURG, Texas - Hundreds of doctors and other medical professionals closed their offices Monday to protest malpractice lawsuits that they say have led to skyrocketing insurance premiums.
Many of them descended on the Hildago County Courthouse Monday for a "day of awareness."
Dr. Jose Igoa, a 47-year-old psychiatrist who held a picket sign, says he paid $28,000 for medical malpractice insurance last year - three to four times what he paid five years ago. Now, he can't find a renewal policy at all.
Like other doctors here, he says he has been the target of frivolous lawsuits that take time out of his practice and are emotionally stressful.
He says the problem is getting worse.
"We're doctors. We train more than half of our lives to help people. We don't want to cause harm to anybody," he said. "We understand that when we cause some damage we want people to be fairly compensated. But when it comes to legal extortion ... it changes the way we practice medicine."
Up the coast in Nueces County, where 63 percent of doctors had claims filed against them in the last 13 years, doctors planned simultaneous activities to show support.
Emergency services at hospitals will not be stopped.
"They see this as a plea for survival for doctors and patients," said Jon Opelt of Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse, which helped organize and publicize the protest.
Critics of the walkout say doctors are being misled by groups backed by big business and seeking limits on jury awards. They say there's no guarantee insurance companies will pass savings from such limits onto policy holders. Meanwhile, they say, tort reforms give patients less recourse against medical errors that kill more people than car accidents, cancer or AIDS.
"Instead of marching on a courthouse, turning their backs on patients, they ought to be marching on the governor's office and joining with constituents to try to do something about skyrocketing insurance rates," said Craig McDonald, director of the lobbying group Texans for Public Justice.
In Texas and nationwide, the insurance industry has been rocked by the stock market slide, the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and lawsuit expenses.
Since 1999, seven of 17 malpractice insurance carriers serving Texas have either left or gone belly up, according to the Texas Department of Insurance.
"Over the last couple of years, we have been paying out more in claims than we have taken in in premiums," said Julie Pulliam of the National Insurance Association. "Claim costs have gone through the roof. The primary reason is the cost of lawsuits. That's why insurers are very supportive of tort reform."
It is affecting everything from hospital charges, which have almost doubled in the last year, to ordinary medical insurance, which is also up almost 100%. Soon the insurance industry is going to collapse in south Texas. It simply cannot continue to function with all the frivolous law suits.
Face it .. we live in a sue happy society ..
Some doctors are leaving Pennsylvania to practise elsewhere. Some are just leaving the profession.
Med students are choosing "safer" specialties, and sick or injured people have to choose from smaller and smaller pools of specialists. The demand for specialists therefore becomes greater and market forces push the costs of surgery up. Fewer specialists means that less talented surgeons are used more often, and more malpractice cases occur, raising rates even further. Insurance companies have to charge higher rates to cover expenses and settlements because the pool of specialists is becoming smaller each year. The only people making out on this deal are a few bloodsucking lawyers who may even see themselves as ultimately making society a better place.
Those groups do not speak for most doctors, although you wouldn't know that judging by the media, who rushes to the more liberal physician's groups whenever they want a quote. Somehow we've reached a point where the right to sue for any reason for as much as possible is considered sacred, while at the same time many other health care rights are being taken away.
The problem is not nearly this bad in Indiana, where we have had reasonable reform of medical malpractice laws for the past fifteen years or so.
Lots and lots of refugee physicians from New York Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and elsewhere, coming to Indiana to have a life.
Many suits are baseless and, most sickening of all, is the type of suit where some patient has some chronic disease state, often due to smoking, drinking, lack of exercise, or overeating, and he basically blames the MD for it.
Plus, as amazing as it seems, many patients are in total denial about how life is finite.
Once I had this elderly patient come in for an elective large abdominal surgery. I was going to do the anesthetic. Horrible lungs, room air sats of 85 percent (bad), bad hypertension, potassium of 2.9 (bad) and no clear reason for that.
I canceled the case and talked to the old lady, who was fairly angry.
"What do you mean, my lungs are no good. First I ever heard about it...Nobody ever told me that I was in bad physical condition...Yes, I used to smoke...I quit a year ago!"
That's what you're dealing with.
Totally disingenuous, passive aggressive patients.
Tell them a million times to quit smoking. They just smile at you.
Tell them to lose weight and get exercise. They just smile at you.
Tell them you want to do a rectal exam for occult blood, maybe detect cancer. They refuse. They don't want no rectal exam.
If you do a procedure on them, say, take out their gallbladder, you can find them on postop day 2 walking down the main hallway of the hospital to have a cigarette outside.
When you tell them that they are jeopardizing the circulation in the wound you just made, by smoking, they just chuckle.
You can warn them all about blood clots in the legs and heart attacks after surgeries, and how smoking makes all that more likely, they don't care.
This is the typical patient in an urban environment.
It is also the typical plaintiff in a lawsuit, who, probably, has no insurance and wants to cheese out of his hospital bill by suing the doctor because he got a wound infection following surgery.
Seen a lot of that type of thing. Makes you sick.
Every state should have a look at Indiana's system, by no means perfect, but better than this Texas crap.
Make it illegal for attorneys to have any contingency arrangements with medical plaintiffs. Let them bill several hundred dollars per hour as they will, but do away with the mega-incentive of a multi-million award, and their 30-40 percent take of it.
Make the loser pay in the lawsuit.
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