A new study of medical malpractice cases finds that, contrary to popular belief, unjustified payments are rare.
The study, published Saturday in Annals of Internal Medicine, says that doctors` care was, in fact, substandard in most cases in which patients won payment for injuries.
Conversely, the study says, ”physicians usually win cases in which physician care was deemed to meet community standards.”
In concluding that unjustified payments are not common, the study contradicts the conventional wisdom among doctors, which holds that malpractice litigation is a lottery and that verdicts often depend on the whims of jurors.
The study suggests that doctors` perceptions of the malpractice problem are worse than the reality. President Bush contends that ”crazy lawsuits”
against doctors and hospitals are a big factor contributing to the explosive growth in the cost of health care. Bush has proposed legislation to curb malpractice lawsuits and to limit damage payments.
The study is one of the first systematic attempts to assess the quality of care in malpractice cases. It is based on 8,231 cases filed in New Jersey over the past 15 years.
In New Jersey, as in other states, most payments result from settlements negotiated by lawyers for patients and for insurance companies. Juries found in favor of doctors in 76 percent of the 976 cases in which there was a jury verdict.
The data were drawn from the state`s doctor-owned insurance company, the biggest insurer of doctors in New Jersey.
”The physicians studied in New Jersey are comparable to doctors in the rest of the nation,” said the chief author of the report, Dr. Mark I. Taragin, an assistant professor at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Piscataway. ”The results of this study are likely to apply to the United States as a whole. The frequency and amount of payments here are similar to those reported in previous national studies.”
When Taragin reported his findings to state legislators in a symposium last Wednesday at the University of Medicine and Dentistry, Republican state Sen. Jack G. Sinagra said: ”All the legislators were surprised. One would think a medical school and a doctor giving a session on tort reform would have a predisposed bias against attorneys, but Dr. Taragin did not.”
In each New Jersey case, the doctor`s performance was classified as defensible or indefensible, based on evaluations by the doctor-owned insurance company. If the company had any bias, it would tend to favor the doctors and to label their care as acceptable. But in almost half the cases in which care was considered indefensible, the doctors themselves admitted error.
In conclusion, Taragin said: ”The current system often comes to the right decision about whether a payment should be made in medical malpractice cases.”
