Physician First Do No Harm; but if you do its OK to coerce patients
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The St. Petersburg Times reports a startling event. Physicians who, through less than candid means, convinced voters to limit the damages that victims of medical malpractice can collect; are now going to "convince" their patients to forgive them for their malpractice.
The Times reports that the waiver, which physicians will ask their patients to sign, will limit non-economic damages to $250,000. So, I guess the way it happens is that sick patients go in to see their "healer" and the doctor explains that he/she will be glad to "heal" them if they will simply sign this "little form". The sick patient does not want to sign the waiver; the healer apologizes for their inability to treat them without the agreement to limit the "healer's" liability to the sick patient in the event something goes wrong.
Physicians and the health care industry bemoaned that if the last round of tort reform was not passed by the public, they would all have to move out of Florida because malpractice insurance would not be affordable. Physicians' groups told the public that caps on damages were a good thing and they better pass them, if patients wanted to keep their doctors.
The insurance industry, though, stood before the legislature and testified that tort reform would have no effect on medical malpractice premiums and that Florida was not in the midst of a malpractice crisis. Study after study reveals the same thing: few malpractice cases are ever filed that lack merit and those that are filed against physicians are usually well deserved.
The fact is that the cost for a plaintiff's attorney to support the investigation and prosecution of a medical malpractice case is significant; sometimes into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The average case takes years to get to trial and the plaintiff attorney is typically carrying all those costs for all those years. Since doctors statistically win in front of juries more often than plaintiffs; many attorneys end up "eating" all those costs in the event of a defense verdict.
The healthcare industry has done a dreadful and shameful job of policing itself. The medical boards are slow to ever discipline doctors and the "peter principle" is alive and well in the healthcare industry. Physicians have adopted the corporate health care mentality; where a patient is more a statistical profit margin than a "sick patient". Patients are treated to ten minutes and a cloud of dust from their physicians; rather than a caring, interested, healer.
Certainly, there are good doctors, just as there are good trial attorneys. I suspect patients will not see this waiver form thrust in front of them by good doctors.
And doctors whine about being sued; it has been the only thing keeping them in check...until now anyway.