When Is It About Money? Why Is It About Time?

Crisis, it is said, means both danger and opportunity. In medical liability reform, however, greater opportunity may lie in noncrisis. In this issue of JAMA, Mello and colleagues offer data suggesting that no crisis of the conventional sort currently exists in the...

Doctors order unnecessary tests without even realizing it

Physicians order unnecessary tests and procedures to inoculate themselves from legal liability more than they realize, according to a new survey of physicians at several hospitals in one Massachusetts health system. Nearly a third of the orders that the surveyed...

Poorly Crafted State Proposition 46 Puts Doctors on Defense

The lawyers who put together and funded Proposition 46 might have been too clever for their own good. The main motivation for the measure is inescapably clear: to raise the ceiling on “noneconomic damages” in medical malpractice lawsuits — in plain language, “pain and...

Proposition 46 is No Cure-All

Physicians should not get drunk or stoned, especially before operating on patients. They ought to make sure their patients need prescriptions for ailments, not to feed addictions. And policymakers should consider updating the 1975 law that capped damages in medical...