Dr. Michael J. Wasserman’s Jan. 22 letter to the editor, “We need medical liability tort reform now,” concerning medical malpractice, deserves a response. Like so many of his colleagues, Wasserman refuses to acknowledge that any perceived crisis in medical care is not the product of the legal system but is the direct result of insurance industry rapacity.
From the mid-1990s until 2000, there was no so-called “crisis” in the medical liability field.
During this period, doctors’ premiums, on an annual basis, remained stable. During this period, there were comparably as many lawsuits and multimillion-dollar verdicts as there are today. There was no crisis because the insurance industry was riding the stock market to billions of dollars of annual profits. Once the stock marked dropped in 2001, the insurance industry started to lose billions of dollars a year; suddenly a medical malpractice liability crisis occurred.
One of the hallmarks of these cyclical insurance industry-driven crises is a call for caps on awards for pain and suffering. The truth of the matter is that caps on non-economic damages have failed to prevent sharp increases in medical malpractice insurance premiums.
Wasserman apparently believes that all physicians should be tried by juries comprised of only physicians. This proposal undermines the fundamental constitutional concept of trial by an impartial jury.
Medical malpractice litigation in this country is far from frivolous. In a major study released in 1999, the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine found that up to 98,000 people are killed each year by medical errors in hospitals–far more than die from car accidents, breast cancer or AIDS. Eight times as many patients are injured by medical malpractice as there are claims filed, and 16 times as many patients suffer injuries as those who have actually received compensation.
Many lawyers share Wasserman’s hope for effective reform of the current medical liability situation. Effective reform, however, means regulating insurance companies that can now raise physicians’ premiums with impunity and without any valid justification.
