Reply #164: Neurosurgery and high-risk obstetrics have high malpractice rates

[mainer]

because those patients are far more likely to have bad outcomes. Not because doctors have to see more of them per hour.

If medical errors were simply a matter of doctors forced to churn through too many patients per hour, then primary care would be the ones with the highest rate of malpractice suits.

I agree that increased scope of practice carries with it an increased expectation of competency. So NPs, with restricted areas of competency, skim off the patients who are least likely to have poor outcomes. They turf the poor-outcome patients to the M.D.s. And this skews any malpractice statistics.

I'm not sure how single payer is going to change that.