The Red Brick Times

Legal Debate: Assumptions on medical malpractice called into question

"This research shows that the problem with medical-malpractice litigation is not that too many undeserving people get paid, but rather that not enough deserving people get paid," says Tom Baker, an attorney at the University of Connecticut in Hartford.

From Science News Online, week of May 13, 2006.

This opens the question of who actually benefits from the practice of medicine. First, we ARE living longer and healthier until we shuffle off. Second, the medical organizations are expanding and erecting "regional health campuses". In Northern Ohio, the Cleveland Clinic is growing and mining suburbia like a mutant prospector octopus. Is this a competetive survival struggle or a way to bury excessive cash flow? Third, those without health insurance or other financial resources are increasingly shut out of this network of glittering new treatment centers, with their radiology departments, laboratories, surgical centers, orthopods, and vision specialists. Compare the scenes at these "medical campuses" with the scenes in traditional 24-7 emergency rooms and urban urgent care facilities. Fourth, individual physicians cannot survive the regulatory and paperwork environment without banding together into large administrative groups. Insurance costs and coding and Medicare billing are too complex to understand. Critical medical decisions are in the hands of clerical functionaries, accountants and lawyers. Last, costs are going up rapidly. Insurance costs, treatment costs, drug costs, everything. Are we getting value for dollars spent? Who is benefiting excessively? How do we make it equitable? Round up the usual suspects? Shrink the bureaucracy, fire the lawyers, tap the insurance companies' massive real estate and stock market portfolios? But that leaves unexamined the matter of our own basic assumptions and practices. Then we can evolve the system. Time to climb back on the stairmaster, drive slower, and replace the steaks with fruit and veggies. Sorry, fast food. You gotta go. Victory garden, here we come.
Posted 9:09 AM by Andy (0) comments

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