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Special points of interest:
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A Message from Dr. Weinstein
 Asked to reflect on the first year in action for PPN’s grassroots campaign, Dr. Weinstein, Chairman of DMLR, had this to say: “We should all be proud of the great progress Protect Patients Now has made in just one short year. We’ve grown our grassroots network by some 800% and educated the public and our federal lawmakers on the magnitude of the national medical liability crisis.”
“Furthermore, we crossed a major milestone in 2006 when two leading Democratic Senators – and potential Presidential candidates – Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama conceded that there is indeed a medical liability crisis that is undermining patients’ ability to get the care they need. This is a dramatic change from the rigid denials of reform opponents in the past, and will help bring the debate on medical liability into the national spotlight in 2007 and as we gear up for the election in 2008.”
“Medical liability reform is still one of the top issues for doctors nationwide and our commitment to passing reform legislation remains as strong as ever. The crisis will only get worse without federal reform. And only we can make sure that reform happens by building on the successes we have already achieved.”
The “Halo Effect”
According to Dr. Harold Jensen, Chairman of Illinois’ largest medical liability insurance provider, his state is seeing a 25% drop in claims due to the “halo effect” of the 2005 reforms that are still awaiting a constitutional test before the courts.
“The public is suddenly starting to understand that these suits are paid for by somebody, and that somebody is them, Dr. Jensen explains. Read more here and here.
Malpractice awards still average about $600,000 and a large backlog of cases, filed before the reform law went into effect, demonstrate the crisis is not over – but the halo effect is a great new name for the power of raising the public’s awareness that it is they who suffer when lawsuit abuse goes unchecked.
Public Citizen Perpetrates “Hoax.”
Public Citizen, Ralph Nader’s anti-reform “consumer” group has issued another discreditable study based on discredited data and manipulated statistics that claims that the medical liability crisis is a figment of your imagination. To read Dr. Weinstein’s response, click here.
Meanwhile, Tillinghast/Towers Perrin recently released a report showing medical liability costs rising 11.4% from 2004 to 2005, well above the average rate of tort cost inflation of 8.7%. Some figment. To read the complete Tillinghast/Towers Perrin report, click here.
As Dr. Weinstein says, this problem isn’t going away – unless we make it.
PPN Interviews Dr. Scott Maizel: Maryland’s “Perfect Storm”
Recently, PPN sat down with Dr. Scott Maizel, a surgeon practicing in Maryland (and one of PPN’s foremost spokespeople), to talk about how the medical liability crisis is affecting his state.
“It’s terrible,” says Dr. Maizel. “In Baltimore County, no new surgeons have entered private practice in the past ten years. It is almost impossible to attract and retain general surgeons throughout most of the state. We’ve been trying to get surgeons into Western Maryland using incentives like signing bonuses, and we still can’t get them to come.
“There are four general surgery programs in the state that together produce 16 general surgeons every year – but no more than 3 per year decide to stay in the state, which hardly makes up for the natural attrition as older doctors retire. The graduate surgeons all want to go to Texas and other reform states, and who can blame them. Meanwhile, the baby boomer doctors are all nearing 60 or more and will soon be retiring – even if rising insurance premiums don’t force them out early.
“It takes a good ten years to produce a decent practicing surgeon, so it will take at least another decade to build back up, even with reform. We can’t afford to put this problem off any longer.
“One difficulty is that the state legislators can get medical care at the academic medical centers at Johns Hopkins and University of Maryland, so they don’t personally experience the effects of the crisis. But if you need care in the middle of the night or in a rural area, you’re out of luck. Ninety-five percent of surgery in Maryland is provided at the community hospital level – so the people are suffering, even if the politicians are well taken care of.
“Meanwhile, the stopgap state subsidies for liability insurance are about to run out and the crisis will then reemerge in all its fury.
“It’s a perfect storm of discouragement: high malpractice rates combined with the lowest reimbursement rates in the country. Hopefully the legislature will act before Maryland’s crisis is too far gone to fix.”
Dr. Maizel is the immediate past president of the Maryland Chapter of the American College of Surgeons and a member of the American College of Surgeons Committee on Patient Safety and Professional Liability.
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