Medical Malpractice Crisis Not A Crisis At All
A study from Texas has determined that the medical malpractice "crisis" behind the push for restrictions on the rights of patients is phony, which is no news to anyone who understands the issue.
"We find no evidence of the medical malpractice crisis that produced headlines over the last several years and led to legal reform in Texas and other states," said the study, conducted by law professors at the University of Texas, University of Illinois and Columbia University law schools.
The article tells us that "'only a few states have comprehensive insurance databases like that of Texas,' said David Hyman, one of the study authors, 'but similar studies elsewhere have found nothing to indicate a link between litigation and rising medical costs.'"
The article goes on to say that "[e]veryone who is collecting data is finding more or less the same thing -- there is no evidence of a tort crisis."
Evidence like this is continuing to mount. We can only hope that legislators (and juries) realize the facts before the tort-reformers are able to further restrict the rights of malpractice victims.
Many of these studies are incomplete and do not consider cases settled out of court: http://badpractice.blogspot.com/2005/03/ny-times-malpractice-lawyers-are.html
Dan is mistaken. Both the Texas study and the Washington study referred to in this blog are "closed claim" studies. That means that the researches look at data on claims that have been settled and claims that have been tried. I agree with Dan that it would be inappropriate to look only at cases that are tried - tried cases represent a small number of total cases and are not representative of the whole. Nevertheless, the referenced studies do not suffer from that bias.
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