Tort Reform: Liability Protection Removed from Connecticut’s New Healthcare Plan
Blog Commentary
A recent editorial in The American Journal of Medicine— — resulted in a minor tidal wave of physician comments about the cost of defensive medicine in the US and the addition of tort reform to the Affordable Care Act when it is revised. Here are just a few of the many comments AJM received.
As practicing physicians, we’re are never afforded the luxury of making any mistakes…period. A mistake, or percieved mistake, is magnified tremendously in the hair salons and country clubs and can do great harm to a physician’s credibility, particularly in smaller towns. So, until the public learns to accept clinical judgement and the inherent occasional misdiagnosis, there will be very little change in the way we physiscians practice.
I recently cared for a patient during rounds as a hospitalist who had been admitted with numerous vague complains in the past year, this time headache. Review of her chart showed over 30 CT scans of various parts in the preceding year, including 2 of her brain in the past week, all negative. It is time we stop worrying about losing our careers to a frivolous lawsuit and spend more time caring for the health of our patients. Not only it is costly to society and to the patient, but unnecessary tests can also be harmful.
From the beginning of med school, we hear about lawsuits. Fear is rampant. Every Dr I know practices defensive medicine. The costs are astronomical. I have seen thousands of examples.
I wish to divert attention to another commentary in the same journal, . Another organization setting the “rules of the game” as deliniated in this article can be the legal profession.
Ironically, as physicians debated defensive medicine on AJM’s blog, trial lawyers in Connecticut successfully removed liability protection from that state’s new healthcare plan for the indigent. From the Hartford Courant…
…a key provision of the plan was that doctors, in return for following the new procedures and ordering fewer tests, would be protected from malpractice suits if the outcome of a case was not favorable for the patient. However, with backing from the Connecticut Trial Lawyers Association, that provision was removed from the SustiNet bill two weeks ago.
According to the newspaper, cardiologists are fighting back against the lack of malpractice protection in Connecticut’s plan.
Cardiologists are considered a particularly important group for the new best-use procedures because they tend to order a battery of expensive tests when patients show signs of heart trouble. If specialists like them failed to participate in the SustiNet program, cutting medical costs could be more difficult.
On Tuesday, the Connecticut chapter of the American College of Cardiology withdrew its support for the bill and said that it would circulate an open letter to House Speaker Christopher G. Donovan and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy saying that it could not support the bill without the malpractice protection.
At Better Health, a community of blogging doctors, one physician predicts doctors will begin to “play hardball” over malpractice reform.
As screws continue to get tightened on doctors’ ability to order tests thanks to third-party oversight bodies, look for more physicians to play hardball about liability limits at both the state AND national levels.
Doctors are being forced to do do their part to control health care costs as a result of our increasingly government-controlled health care initiatives. It’s high time for the trial lawyers’ to do the same. And there’s already precedent to doing so: just look to the legal protections military doctors enjoy when caring for their members. While legal recourse still exists in the military, the challenge of suing the government on behalf of their employees thwarts frivolous claims.
What is playing out now in Connecticut foreshadows what will happen if and when tort reform is addressed at the national level.
— Pamela J. Powers, MPH, AJM Managing Editor
