Medical Malpractice Relief
I'm writing this in a waiting room in a large hospital. My wife and I have been here several days with her mother who broke her leg a few days ago. With a lot of time on my hands in the midst of all this healthcare I found myself thinking about Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama's plans to solve the healthcare "crisis."
Their primary concern seems to be the cost of needed healthcare, not its actual availability. There are many reasons that healthcare costs have increased at a higher rate than most life essentials. Among these are two of the biggest reasons: the availability of expensive high-tech diagnostic equipment and medical malpractice litigation. This post is about the latter reason.
I believe that if we can get rid of malpractice suits, and the need for doctors to carry very expensive insurance to protect themselves from such suits, healthcare will become much less expensive. Some will complain though that people must be able to sue to protect themselves from incompetent healthcare providers. I say a better approach is to do your homework in choosing your healthcare providers and then just take your lumps if things go wrong. But I have a plan that will accommodate both approaches.
Congress should pass a law that allows individuals to choose their approach. If they choose to carefully select their providers and then take their chances without the right to be compensated for damages, they should expect to pay much less for their health-care. If they choose to retain the right to to be compensated for damages, they should expect to pay much more for their health-care. The law should allow health-care providers to operate exclusively under one approach or the other or under either approach on a case by case basis. The law should provide a form or document containing a standardized statement that guarantees that a health-care provider cannot be sued for malpractice if his patient signs the document before receiving treatment.
I believe only a few years will have passed before everyone will be opting for the less expensive approach and that this law will then make more affordable health-care available to more people than either of the candidates' plans. And maybe we could avoid having the same caliber of government-provided health-care as our government-provided education.
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Here is another option. How about doctors are treated like the rest of us who have car insurance. If we wreck our car over, and over our premiums go up. If you practice medicine within the standard of care and no claims against you then you would recieve a decrease or credit of some sort.
There are many good doctors out there and only a few who are not working within the standard of care, and maybe insurance companies should look at dropping the repeat offenders, just like my insurance would if I continued wrecking my car.
Please visit my website and educate yourself on surgical fires.
www.surgicalfire.org
That Surgicalfire.org is one scary site. As one who has been involved in one way or another with drastic, expensive medical errors I have a hard time with there being no insurance out there. The system we have now though is out of hand. Perhaps there is a compromise between your two plans. Just as you wouldn't willingly get in the car with someone who is considered a high insurance risk, you wouldn't want such a doctor either. Malpractice records in Florida were opened to the public a few years ago. It appeared to me that the doctors themselves were charged with reporting, and if a suit wasn't filed, nothing came to light. We truly are operating in the dark when choosing a doctor.
Colorado recently passed a new law that will disclose certain information on doctors practicing in Colorado. The problem is this bill should be passed in all 50 states not just Colorado. As consumers we really are navigating through the medical system with little or no information at all when it comes to picking a doctor hospital etc... The infection rates at hospitals in the United States are terrible this information should also be disclosed to the public.
I will always advocate for change, and hope others can learn from the costly mistakes that were made on innocent people seeking treatment. To learn NOTHING is the shame.