Patients Pushed To Get Political (By OB/GYNs)

[shockingelk]

As early as next week, physicians across the state plan to start handing out tens of thousands of postcards for patients to send to their state senators. The preprinted cards are intended to let legislators know that doctors are not the only ones concerned about the escalating insurance costs threatening their practices.

...They have launched a new political action committee to help defeat candidates who do not embrace legal reforms as an antidote to doctors' medical malpractice woes

..."Things have really changed," said Ann Burke, an obstetrician-gynecologist with offices in Silver Spring and Greenbelt. "It's now a question of being able to survive. That's driving the willingness to be politically active. There's a recognition that we're going to have to spend more time and more money to have more influence."

...Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) has emerged as one of their most vocal cheerleaders. In a flurry of visits to hospitals in recent weeks, he has urged physicians to frame the malpractice issue to the public as one of patient access.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1167-2004Sep6.html

Maybe we now know why Bush is obsessed with OB/GYNs.

[pennylane100]

1. malpractice insurance costs would go down

if all OB/GYN doctors stopped practising loving their patients.

[truthisfreedom]

2. i don't see why Kerry and crew can't find a way to co-opt some part of

this if it is really causing a problem for the doctors. maybe the approach would be to regulate the insurance companies and force them to cover doctors at reasonable rates.

[Sugarbleus]

4. I agree. I don't think it's Lawyers that are the problem

I believe it's the insurance industry that's the problem. The entire Insurance Industry is in the Extortion business, by and large. Policies straight out of the Mafia's play book.

At this point, I'm leaning towards regulating everything. I know a whole host of industries/corporations would howl like dying wolves but tough noogies.

[sendero]

11. Exactly...

... you have the health insurance companies up against the malpractice/liability companies. The doctors are pawns in the middle.

The only way health care is ever going to work right in this country is to get the freaking insurance companies who are sucking 25% of every health care dollar OUT OF THE HEALTH CARE BUSINESS.

[girl gone mad]

3. My OB/GYN was for..

Hilary's health care plan.

I guess he never stopped loving his patients.

[tibbir]

5. A big part of the problem

is that the medical profession doesn't do a thorough enough job of keeping its members in line.

[leesa]

9. Can you explain that comment? I work in the medical industry and

generally speaking, doctors do the best job they can within an outrageously difficult system.
It is the gouging of the insurance companies and the pharmaceuticals that are destroying the medical industry.

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

21. There was a study demonstrating between 48,000 and 98,000

hospital related deaths per year due to malpractice. The reason the study could not get MORE specific (and it was a HUGE study undertaken by a newspaper consortium) was because of confidential settlements (thereby keeping details of cases from the public eye)and the fact that it was impossible to discern whether the error was on the part of the hospital or the doctor or faulty drugs.

Most State Medical Quality Assurance Boards are underfunded so policing the quality of doctors is nearly impossible and the medical profession practices honor amongst theives...malpractice suits are one of the FEW ways to get bad doctors away from patients. Clinton had a good plan which was to DEFINE the minimum threshold of care for the most common lawsuits...if the doc met the minimum then there was no case...it would be easy enough. We also need INSURANCE REFORM>

Here's some info from some of my previous DU threads on the issue:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/cgi-bin/duforum/duboard.cgi?az=show_thread&om=757&forum=DCForumID31&archive=yes


and another thread:

Why it matters: The medical system is a leading killer
LAST EDITED ON Jan-12-03 AT 08:06 PM (ET)
In 1998, reporters Fred Schulte and Jenni Bergal at the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel wanted to find deaths from cosmetic surgery, but their reporting had hit a dead end.

Doctors hinted at horrendous problems that a colleague was having, then provided no details. And, coroners said they knew of no deaths from liposuction, a supposedly safe cosmetic surgery that makes people thinner.

All that changed when Schulte and Bergal searched records where the bodies were piling up: the county morgue. The slow, painstaking review unearthed striking cases. The reporters identified even more deaths from liposuction when they investigated hundreds of malpractice suits

snip
Two studies in the IOM report estimate that between 44,000 and 98,000 people are killed each year from medical errors.2
Medication errors are thought to cause 7,000 deaths annually – more than the 6,000 deaths that occur each year in the workplace.2 The annual cost of medication errors is at least $2 billion.2
Total costs for preventable medical mistakes, including lost wages and extra health costs, are estimated to be between $17 billion and $29 billion a year.2 Preventable mistakes in hospitals alone are thought to cost from 2 percent to 4 percent of national health expenditures.2
Forty-two percent of randomly selected Americans said they had personal knowledge of a medical error that had happened to themselves, a relative or a friend, according to an October 1997 poll financed by the National Patient Safety Foundation, an independent group established by the American Medical Association

http://www.ahcj.umn.edu/qualityguide/chapter2.html

Note: This is an extremely LONG read about the entire medical system and the way it markets and delivers care. It debunks much of the tort-reform argument by demonstrating how very few cases of malpractice actually see their day in court, let alone get filed. It has every aspect of medical care covered, including reporting of medical care. It goes into great detail about the financial motivation to ignore KILLER medicine. It is a MUST READ!


http://www.democraticunderground.com/cgi-bin/duforum/duboard.cgi?az=show_thread&om=688&forum=DCForumID31&archive=yes

[LizW]

6. Hmmm, would those be the same OB/GYNs

that Bushco ignored when he was passing a ban on many forms of abortion? The ones who said Bushco was making up names for medical procedures and taking away their ability to make sound medical decisions?

Money trumps principle, again.

[colonel odis]

7. sounds mildly coercive to me.

"so if you'd like me to keep practicing long enough to deliver your baby, send this postcard to your legislator saying if i show up drunk and do something that ruins your baby's health, you can't sue me."

[JerseygirlCT]

8. "legal reform", legal reform, legal reform -m

where the heck is the INSURANCE reform regulation?

The problem isn't that people seek redress for the wrongs done them through the courts. The problem is that the insurers are holding doctors captive to skyrocketing rates that often have no connection to higher claims paid.

Not to mention the doctors themselves who need to do a better job policing themselves, and outing the bad eggs among them.

[havocmom]

12. Didn't Texas get tort 'reform'? Don't they have some of the highest rates

for malpractice insurance anyway?

Tort reform is one of those RW code words for taking recourse for damages from the average citizen. Once again, it is a gimme to big business under the guise of 'protecting' us.

Hogwash.

Single payer would save a bundle.

[JerseygirlCT]

13. Yes, I remember reading that. Once again, they're full of BS.

And yes, I agree. The whole system is mucked up. Some sort of single-payer makes more and more sense to me.

[RhodaGrits]

10. The reforms needed involve streamlining the judicial process so that

a malpractice suit is first sent for arbitration and if unable to be settled, then it should be speedily processed instead of taking years and years and years while the lawyers are all billing by the hour.

As a victim of severe medical malpractice, I wish I had been able to sue the bastard but by the time anyone told me that since it had occurred as a child and was not discovered until I was an adult that I had 3 yrs to file a claim, it was passed the 3 year mark. (I assumed it was 3 yrs from when the incident occurred.) As a health professional, I am horrified by how the court system deals with medical malpractice. There are reforms needed but they can start at the government level - get the stick out of your eye first Bush!

[merh]

18. That type of legislation has been proposed in many states

and it is the doctor's that have lobbied to kill the legislation.

The legislation would provide for a medical review board comprised of doctors and legal professionals that would evaluate the claim, attempt to arbitrate and if arbitration fails, the filing of suit would be allowed.

Physicians and medical facilities have lobbied against it and killed it.

Doctors do not properly regulate themselves. They allow physicians to continue to practice that are known alcoholics, drug abusers, chronic screw ups, et cetera. Doctors need to heal their own before pointing the fingers at others.

All that being said, the insurance companies are robbing us all -- all insurance premiums have shot up because of the bad investments and the dips in the stock market.

[shadu]

14. Insurance companies are wildly profitable

They gotta go.

25% of the suits are created by under 2% of the
physicians. Fire those physicians.

[Samurai_Writer]

15. Most physicians in Florida don't carry malpractice insurance

When I had surgery last April, I had to sign a waiver at my surgeon's office stating I was aware he did not carry malpractice insurance. Guess it had gotten so high in Florida that most have simply dropped it. So if anything goes wrong, you can still sue, but you won't get much if anything from the doctor personally.

[TexasBushwhacker]

16. This is SO inappropriate!

The reason malpractice premiums are high is because medical boards let bad doctors continue to practice medicine. Case in point: on 48 hours last week they covered people trying to lose weight - surgery, Atkins, the Subway guy, other diets. They had a doctor would had a very bad track record on gastric bypass surgeries. Several of his patients had died and many more had severe complications. Some had medical bills topping a million dollars because of this doctors botched operations. He was being sued by dozens of his patients. He'd lost priviledges at one of the hospitals he once operated at. Did he lose his license? NO He was put on probation by the medical board and had to agree to have his next 100 gastic bypass surgeries observed by another doctor. It doesn't take too many doctors like this to make everyone's malpractice insurance go up.

[rooboy]

17. Malpractice is not the reason premiums are so high...

the insurance companies did their collective asses in on bad investments and are bumping up the premiums to cover their losses. You watch - tort reform will have little or no effect on this.

[merh]

19. California has had "tort reform" for years ...

their insurance rates still climb - it has not effect.

[havocmom]

20. Bingo. Didn't homeowners' insurance start to climb right after the stock

bubble burst? What is the excuse your auto carrier gives for rate increases? Same thing happened to insurance rates across the board in the late 70s, early 80s. Bad investments are what hit the insurance companies then and the problem repeated in recent years.

They make a lot of logical sounding arguments, but when most or all insurance rates go up for most or all people...

Investment $$ is what they count on. The premiums you pay do not sit in a desk drawer, accumulating until you have a claim. The insurance companies invest it. Problem is, they invest in other companies which use creative accounting to look more profitable than they are so they can sell more stock to more suckers so CEOs can buy more houses and planes.

And we are presently seeing America 'run like a business' by the same species that created all this mess to start with. They are just about outta suckers to bilk on their ponzi stocks and now rely on bilking the taxpayers to hold their pyramids afloat. You bet they want us all to have 'ownership' of our Social Security accounts! They wanna grab that money while the boomers are still working and before Gen X all sees through their scheme.