Maryland Injury and Disability Law : Washington DC Metro Injury & Disability Lawyer & Attorney : Greenberg & Bederman : Accidents, Falls, Medical Malpractice : Maryland, DC, Virginia

We also learned that Tennessee is actually one of “safest” states in the Union for doctors when it comes to medical malpractice:

Tennessee is among the lowest-risk states for doctors, in part, Day said, because of a very old legal principle still in use in Tennessee, known as the “local standard of care.”Most states have adopted statewide standards to assess care, but Tennessee cases can still be argued county by county.

“This particularly harms patients in rural areas because the defense claims that only rural doctors know how medicine is practiced in rural areas,” Day said.

Ironically, we also discovered how effective the press has been towards disclosing some facts on public perception about medical malpractice cases :

Twenty years of bad press about the effect of malpractice suits on health care costs also predisposes jurors against plaintiffs, Day said.

We also can feel empathy toward the doctors who want to practice medicine safely and effectively and how the numbers reveal just how seldom medical malpractice cases actually occur :

At the end of the year, [medical malpractice cases are] barely a quarter of 1 percent of all cases, but those cases are on the minds of every doctor, every time they step into an exam room.

We read how these medical malpractice cases affect doctors all over Tennessee, and presumably all over the country:

“The financial and emotional costs of professional liability litigation are tremendous; trying to avoid lawsuits involves every day of my life, every judgment that I make, and every order that I write,” Francis said. “Is that not sad?”

Honestly, this was such a well written article that for a moment, yes, we actually did feel sad. But then we remembered what it was that we just read: If an injury victim files a medical malpractice lawsuit, he or she only has a fifteen percent chance of success, and that’s only if the plaintiff’s attorney takes the case. The odds of success for the plaintiffs are presumably lower in Tennessee, where the “standards of care” vary from county to county and where the juries are going to be more inclined to support the doctors. We also remember that medical malpractice cases only occur in one-quarter of one percent of all the court cases, and that one main reason medical malpractice lawsuits are so expensive is not due to the victim who filed the lawsuit, or even the facts of the case, but because the main tactic of many of the defense attorneys is to outspend the plaintiff by hiring more expert witnesses than the plaintiff’s attorney can afford.

So in a state where the deck is completely stacked against people who file medical malpractice lawsuits and the bulk of the costs increasing from the defense attorneys, we are supposed to believe that the real problem is the injury victims who file medical malpractice suits and their attorneys, who take no money up front, don’t charge by the hour, and pay for the services of any expert witnesses out of their own pockets.

The solution to all of this, by the way, is an even bigger reduction of the miniscule amounts of lawsuits that are being filed:

“Obviously, too many medical malpractice suits are being filed,” said general and vascular surgeon Hugh Francis III, a partner at Memphis Surgery Associates.

We would like to propose another idea that would presumably cut costs. Since there are already “caps” on damages that already exist in so many states, why not also put a “cap” on the amount of money that attorneys on either side can spend on “expert witnesses?” Surely this would help cut the costs for both the defendants and the plaintiffs’ attorneys, and would surely then cut the costs of the insurance premiums, which insurance companies just won’t do.   Why would insurance companies reduce a profit center on doctors who believe that their malpractice premium costs keep spiraling due to malpractice lawsuits, when in fact the numbers reveal the opposite is true? Why then do the insurance companies keep raising the malpractice rates on doctors? Could it be that the insurance company investments have declined due to the market and they need to make up their portfolio balance somewhere?

Greenberg and Bederman is an injury law firm based in metropolitan Washington, D.C.  A significant portion of our practice is dedicated to helping people who have been injured due to medical malpractice. That includes medical negligence, surgical errors, or misdiagnosis, all of which is a violation of the standard of care. If you or a loved one in the metropolitan D.C. area or Baltimore has been injured by a doctor, surgeon, or medical professional, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free medical malpractice legal consultation today.

To learn more about medical malpractice, please read our medical malpractice FAQ.  To learn more about our medical malpractice attorney, John Sellinger, please read John's Bio, or watch his video on youtube.

"What I would be willing to do is to consider any ideas out there that would actually work in terms of reducing costs, improving the quality of patient care…So far the evidence I've seen is that caps will not do that."

We agree completely. In the first place, there is no evidence that instituting caps on the amount of damages that victims of medical malpractices can receive will do anything to lower health care costs. This premise has been floated before. Back in 2004, President Bush claimed that:

“One of the major cost drivers in the delivery of health care are these junk and frivolous lawsuits. The risk of frivolous litigation drives doctors -- and hear me out on this -- they drive doctors to prescribe drugs and procedures that may not be necessary, just to avoid lawsuits. That's called the defensive practice of medicine.”

But President Bush was using statistics that were then questioned by the Government Accounting Office and the Congressional Budget Office due to the fact that these numbers came from study that only covered a miniscule element of health care and then compared it to the entire health care system. So in this case, the President said one thing, but the guys in charge of the checkbooks said another entirely.

Oddly enough, tort costs are the one element in health care that haven’t gone up. While everything else from doctor visits to MRI’s are getting more and more expensive, the one thing that hasn’t gone up in price or number are malpractice suits. The number of malpractice suits per year has remained constant for decades, and so have the payouts, even after you adjust them for inflation.

Another study claims that malpractice costs are averaging $30.4 billion per year, which seems like a lot until you realize two things: First, the majority of that $30.4 billion is due to premiums, not payouts. Secondly, while $30.4 billion seems like an astronomical number, bear in mind that we have a $2 trillion health care system. $30.4 billion adds up to 1% of that. Surely there are better places to cut costs than the amount an injury victim can receive, which is what insurers want.

This is what the argument boils down to after all. Should there be a limit on the amount of money that someone who was a victim of medical malpractice can receive? Should that limit be $200,000, no matter what? If a surgeon removes the wrong limb? If a doctor misdiagnoses an easily recognizable illness and the victim spends six months in the hospital as a result? If the patient is the victim of unforgivable medical incompetence and his life is irrevocably altered as a result? If the victim is so damaged by medical malpractice or a violation of the standard of care that he is unable to live a normal life? Is all that only worth $200,000?

We don’t think so. And we are sure that all of the victims who we have successfully represented inmedical malpractice cases in DC, Maryland or Virginia don’t think so either.  

If you or a loved one has been injured due to the actions of a doctor, surgeon or other medical professional in the Washington, D.C. area, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free medical malpractice legal consultation today.

Bad Doctors, Not Bad Law

11/11/2007: Donda West, the mother and onetime manager of rapper Kanye West, died Saturday in Los Angeles. BBC News quotes her publicist as saying she passed away "as the result of complications from a cosmetic surgical procedure," but gave no more details. West's spokesman said the family "asks for privacy during this time of grief."

The doctor who performed the surgery was named Jan Adams, who was something of a celebrity in addition to being a plastic surgeon. He had appeared as a panelist on a show called The Other Half, which was a sort of an all male version of The View. He had also set himself up as a go-to medical issues pundit for news programming, appearing on CNN, ABC, and NBC, and he was also featured regularly on the Discovery Channel. Mr. Adams is a pretty good looking guy, and comes across as charming and personable.

But he apparently wasn’t a very good surgeon.

Prior to his operation on Ms. West, Dr. Adam’s had been named in a series of separate medical malpractice lawsuits.  The complaints involved a sponge left in during surgery, lack of informed consent, and professional negligence and fraudulent misrepresentation. There is also a rather unsettling history of DUI arrests, as well as allegations of abuse. Yet after all of this, Dr. Adams was only required to surrender his license to practice medicine in March of this year, which is almost a year and a half after Ms. West died after surgery and several years after multiple lawsuits and run-ins with the law.

It often takes a high profile example of a systemic problem to bring that problem to the attention of the general public. The case of Dr. Adams and Ms. West led many people to ask why he was still able to practice medicine after years of poor performance and erratic and irresponsible personal behavior. We believe that Dr. Adams was only one example of the medical profession as a whole failing to police itself.

A 2003 article from the Virginian Pilot describes in graphic detail how lax the standards are with state medical boards, using statistics from the National Practitioner Data Bank as examples. In the article, author Liz Szabo notes that there are hundreds of doctors in Virginia alone who still have their licenses, even after episodes of gross incompetence and criminal convictions, up to and including murder. If a state medical board is hesitant to revoke the license of a Norfolk doctor who murdered his wife, as the article states, it seems less of a surprise that someone like Jan Adams was still practicing even after multiple lawsuits, settlements, judgments and arrests.

The argument for such low standards is essentially that since it takes so much time and money to earn a medical license, state medical boards are willing to offer multiple chances to doctors who make mistakes. In fact, nurses are held to tougher employment standards then doctors. While we realize that even the most competent and professional of doctors can make errors during the course of treatment, it is clear that the standards need to be improved. You have to wonder what the outcome would have been for Ms. West had the California medical board taken action against Dr. Adams when it became clear that there was a problem with his competence.

It is dishonest of tort reformers to make it seem like the problem is just the court system. The idea that the medical profession is the blameless victim here does not hold water. And we fail to see how limiting the victims’ access to the courts while bad doctors are allowed to keep practicing will solve anything.

If you or a loved one Maryland, Virginia or Washington DC has been injured due to the actions of a doctor or other medical professional, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

If you want to learn more about medical malpractice issues please read our medical malpractice page.  If you want to learn more about our medical malpractice lawyer, please read about John Sellinger, or watch his medical malpractice video on UTUBE.