I am the principal partner at Clifford Law Offices, a law firm that concentrates in personal injury and wrongful death litigation. Fair-minded people should be angry to read the exaggerations in “Medical malpractice costs driving doctors out,” (Voice of the People, Jan. 9). Gregory D. Moss and Helen Kraus, physicians at the Resurrection Medical Center in Chicago, wrote about the undisputed fact that the cost of physicians’ malpractice premiums increased in the last few years, but it is not due to the threat of facing a malpractice lawsuit, as these doctors suggest.
It has been proven to be caused by cyclical price gouging that insurers institute when they receive a poor return in plummeting stock and bond markets that spared no one’s investments.
This letter stated: “Physicians should not . . . have to face bankruptcy for being human.” One would have to search far and wide for a case in Illinois where a physician’s personal assets were put on the line in a malpractice case.
The letter goes on to say that “Physicians . . . see jury awards for non-economic (punitive) damages exceed their policy limits.” Non-economic damages are not punitive damages. Illinois has banned punitive damages in medical malpractice cases as a measure of tort reform. They are two categories of damages in a civil lawsuit with two very different purposes. While punitive damages are meant to punish a defendant when the conduct is willful and wanton or recklessly indifferent to the health and safety of others, non-economic damages can be recovered for a person’s disability, disfigurement, pain and suffering and loss of consortium.
The fact is that the average claim pay-out by medical malpractice insurance companies is about $30,000 per year and has been virtually unchanged for the last decade, according to a 2001 study by the Consumer Federation of America of actual claims paid.
The fact is that this same group found that medical malpractice costs, as a percentage of health-care costs, are at an all-time low: .55, or about one-half of 1 percent.
The fact is that malpractice premiums in California nearly doubled in the first four years after it instituted a $250,000 cap on non-economic damages. It wasn’t until 1988, when voters approved insurance reforms requiring a 20 percent rollback in all premiums for all types of insurance and requiring insurance companies to justify any further rate increases before they could be imposed, that rates there began to stabilize.
The fact is, of the nearly 100,000 people killed each year by preventable medical error in hospitals, only one out of eight of those families actually pursues a medical malpractice claim.
The fact is that 5.1 percent of doctors account for more than half of the malpractice payouts, according to the National Practitioners Data Bank, but the profession refuses to be more aggressive in disciplining these recidivists.
The fact is that in Illinois, the average jury award in medical malpractice suits tried in Cook County dropped to a three-year low, according to an analysis by the Jury Verdict Reporter released last June.
Moss and Kraus’ solution is to take away every citizen’s right to a jury trial. Jurors stand as an important symbol of our constitutional rights as well as serve an educational function in setting the standard for what is acceptable conduct by negligent doctors and hospitals. Instead doctors should take a stand against insurance companies in pressing for accountability and more affordable malpractice premiums.
