Medical liability

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by timojin, Feb 15, 2017.

  1. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    We should be a cap on liability litigation to stop medical bills .

    There are many unnecessary tests performed just protect for litigation
     
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  3. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    That's the designed enforcement mechanism of free market delivery of medical care - it's what enforces standards of care when you don't have those bad, intrusive government regulations.
     
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  5. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    Free market is competition , but does not have much to do with suing. Suing without cap it encourages peoples to be greedy, Suing is a game between lawyers to strep the public.
     
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  7. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    And the evidence is where?
     
  8. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    It's the designed-in enforcement mechanism for standards of medical care in a free market. It replaces all those bad government regulations, that market interference from special interest groups like the AMA, and so forth.

    Ask any doc. http://www.healthleadersmedia.com/physician-leaders/97-ed-physicians-order-unnecessary-imaging-tests
     
  9. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    My wife was in the hospital for observation overnight because of pain on the left side .The bill was 28653.49 dollars
     
  10. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    Why are you repeating to me your previous post.
    My sister in law was for 2 months in hospital in Canada ( Toronto ) the bill was not even on half.
     
  11. Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

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    Because you apparently have not understood what he is saying. You have failed to notice he is broadly agreeing with you. Please reflect on the use of irony in writing.
     
  12. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    That isn't evidence of anything other than high healthcare costs and uninsurance. I asked you to support your assertion that malpractice costs are a significant driver of healthcare costs.

    Do you not understand that the Canadian healthcare system is a government run single payer system? It isn't a free market system.
     
  13. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    How do you know those tests are unnecessary? When people become ill there is no magic device telling the physician what is wrong. The diagnosis process is one in which the physician rules out possibilities in order to derive a diagnosis.
     
  14. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    There's a link for you in post 5.

    "Defensive medicine" is common enough to have a slang term and a Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_medicine
     
  15. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    The problem I have with ever increasing medical liability, stems from a more fundamental problem. If you compare the medical and legal professions, doctors are more respected than lawyers. The question I have is, why aren't there as many law suits against lawyers, as there are against doctors? Who are there not a similar numbers of legal malpractice suits as medical malpractice suits since lawyers are considered less trustworthy?

    One reason is, medical liability law is a type of checks and balance, where an outside profession; lawyers, polices the doctors. We don't really have a similar checks and balances where another outside group, deals with lawyers in the same way. In a parallel universe, this would require lawyers spending a lot of money in proactive self defense and malpractice insurance to avoid the equivalent of ambulance chasers.

    Lawyers are not considered the most trustworthy of professions, yet the legal profession has been allowed to set up a system where fox is in charge of the chicken coop. Why not allow doctors to being in charge of their own chicken coop; self police, like lawyers? Or why not use what are considered honest professions, like in science, clergy and doctors, to police and shake down lawyers, using frivolous law suits, that extract money from them and the expensive insurance they will be force for buy?

    As an example of the fox in charge of the chicken coop, in court, lawyers do not have to take an oath to tell the truth. They can know their client is guilty, but they get to say the client is not guilty in court and get away with this. A witness needs to take an oat to tell the truth, but the lawyers, by being in charge of their own profession, sets up a self serving system.

    Say you was choking and an off duty doctor at a restaurant helps you, but breaks a rib in the process helping you. This may be grounds for a frivolous law suit. Say you were assigned an attorney for court, and you suffer an opportunity cost from fines and loss of income due to jail, why is there no malpractice law suit due to unintended harm? Both the doctor and lawyers are trying to help, but in both cases there is an unattended consequences.

    If we had checks and balances, where doctors can overlord the lawyers, then it would fair to have medical liability. America has more lawyers than any other country. I don't see the social need, other than a system designed by lawyers, to serve lawyers. A checks and balance that allow both valid and frivolous legal malpractice suits, will help thin the lawyer herd and should be able get to get rid of the scammer and schemas, until lawyers are considered as trustworthy as doctors.
     
    Last edited: Feb 16, 2017
  16. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    What a great skill, you can post links. Now answer the question and read my post. It helps if you read and understand the post before you respond to it.
     
  17. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    And where is the evidence to support your assertions? Where is the evidence which leads you to your conclusions?

    Well thankfully we don't live in your dystopian ideal and neither physicians or lawyers oversea each other. Ribs are cracked all the time in medicine, and physicians and others aren't sued for it. I've broken a number of ribs in my life. It happens, sometimes intentionally and sometimes it just cannot be avoided. You do CPR on an old person; I guarantee you, you will break some ribs.

    No one has proven that medical liability costs or defensive medicine is a significant driver of medical costs. Probably because it's a myth. Medical liability judgement are twofold:

    1) actual damages
    2) punitive damages

    When people are injured due to medical malpractice, who should pay? We have a long tradition in law that says if you damage other people you need to pay for the damage you cause. You are arguing we should make an exception for physicians. Why should physicians be exempt from the law? Why should the victim be required to pay for the damage inflicted by others?
     
  18. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    Writing is communicating and not showing off the ability to express your intellect.
     
  19. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    What do you―or the next person, as such―know of the business model at any given hospital? Here's a detail that might be uniquely American: Before the ACA, if you were uninsured, then the first thing you did when you got your bill was call the hospital and demand the insurance rate.

    That is to say, the bills they sent uninsured individuals charged grotesquely higher prices, and every once in a while an insurance executive would commit a Kinsley gaffe and, in discussing other issues of the industry, let slip that these inflated prices were an offset for the cuts they were giving the insurance companies. Before it was all over, I'm pretty sure I heard a couple talking heads in the cable television discourse actually pushing the point as if it was some answer of merit. The bottom line is that some portion of the crippling debt wrecking the uninsured was intended to fund insurance outcomes.

    And that's the thing. If you or I work in a certain part of the industry we can sit around all day talking up the details of how everything gets so expensive, but it's a bit obscure to everyday consumers; the important question for our purposes is how much of that money is profit in whose pocket?

    And in the long run, the problem with simply providing care and figuring the rest out, later, is that providing care is rarely the first priority of the business model.

    By making care provision the end product instead of the first priority, everybody else's slice of the financial pie becomes more important for being somehow "necessary" to the end product. And that financial priority applies at every functional layer of the industry, even seeping into doctor-patient relations.

    And that will continue to affect circumstances and outcomes as long as the point of societal health policy is a business proposition first, and a health consideration whenever we can afford to get around to it.

    Related example from another industry ― There remains in the world today an apparel company that I generally think of as a shoe company; they make athletic gear. My father and I used to argue this bit a lot because he was known to preach the merits of "capitalism" in that context that has become some manner of political framework―i.e., American assertions of capitalism are not capitalism proper, and in some cases even dispute with Adam Smith―and for much of this period he really did seem to entertain a petit bourgeois attitude that sided with the bourgeoisie over the proletariat on the grounds that management had merit because without management there would be no labor. But it's true, the hippie selling necklaces in the concert parking lot is both labor and management in many cases; management is unavoidable as such. But it is also true that without labor, management has nothing to sell, and labor does not necessarily need such management as the American model supplies, sucking up money while pinching labor compensation. In the end, this shoe company I'm thinking of laid off three thousand workers for financial necessity, a notorious maneuver since the next thing the board did―very nearly literally, though I wasn't in the boardroom so I can't promise it was actually literally the immediately next thing―was award themselves bonuses. And the argument for the merit in this maneuver was that in saving the company a bunch of money, the executives had earned that money. Apparently, the company "needed" the money, as such, in order to give it to the executives.​

    With health insurance and medical costs, perhaps it is instructive to consider recission. It is one thing to control for fraud, but another to invoke, say, a badly-dotted i to cancel an insurance policy precisely at a time the company needs to pay out on it. This loss of health insurance severely damages, and even destroys, lives. Then again, if you manage to eliminate three hundred million dollars in payouts, yeah, the company is going to give you a bonus and throw you a party. And when the CEOs went before Congress, they were asked, one after the other, about recission, and not a one of them intended to end the practice.

    Which in turn reminds: When and if medical liability becomes an issue, is the problem that people have rights and exercise them, or does anyone stop to talk about liability insurance rates, terms, and processes?
     
  20. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    I suggest you read, " The Medical Malpractice Myth", by Tom Baker.

    This, according to Tom Baker, is the myth of medical malpractice, and as a reality check he offers The Medical Malpractice Myth, a stunning dismantling of this familiar, but inaccurate, picture of the health care industry. Are there too many medical malpractice suits? No, according to Baker; there is actually a great deal more medical malpractice, with only a fraction of the cases ever seeing the inside of a courtroom. Is too much litigation to blame for the malpractice insurance crisis? No, for that we can look to financial trends and competitive behavior in the insurance industry. Are these lawsuits frivolous? Very rarely. Point by point, Baker—a leading authority on insurance and law—pulls together the research that demolishes the myths that have taken hold about medical malpractice and suggests a series of legal reforms that would help doctors manage malpractice insurance while also improving patient safety and medical accountability. http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3662467.html
     
  21. Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

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    He communicated to me perfectly well. I recognise that you are working a foreign language, so I took the time to explain to you what I understood him to mean.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Feb 16, 2017
  22. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    As an observer, I confess it is/was not obvious who is arguing one which side of this issue.
    I too thought IceAura was attempting to counter Tim's claim.
     
  23. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    There is a link for you in post 5, and another in post 11.

    Lawsuit is the designated mechanism for enforcing standards of care in a free market, unregulated system.
    Threat of lawsuit is a significant driver of medical costs, in various ways (insurance premiums, defensive medicine, extra record keeping, etc), as an item of common knowledge among the well informed - documented in those links (they contain references, etc). (Whether or not the lawsuits are frivolous is beside the point).
    That's one way the pretense of free market competition drives up medical care costs in the US.
     

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