Tort Reform Denounced by Harvard Study
May 16, 2006The Harvard University has been getting a lot of play in the media lately. Its been miscontrued and ourtight lied about by politicians pushing for tort refrom. For example, in Oklaoma a politician recently cited the study as saying that 40% of claims are frivilous and this study evidences the need for tort refrom. His assertions are blatenlty false and probably derived to him from his employer when he is not at the capitol, an insurance company.
In reality the study reviewed more than 1,400 medical malpractice cases handled by five insurance companies over a 20-year period (from 1984 to 2004) and found that 40 percent of those lawsuits involved no medical
error."
The study also found that 27% of malpractice cases go unpaid, now how much effect is this having on our tax dollar since these people do need treatment.
As you can see from the article, in actuality "FOR 3% of the 1400 claims studied there were no verifiable medical injuries, and 37% did not involve errors. Most of the claims that were not associated with errors (370 or 515
[72%]) or injuries DID NOT result in compensation."
CONCLUSION: "Claims that lack evidence or error are not uncommon, but MOST ARE DENIED COMPENSATION. The vast majority of expenditures go toward litigation over errors and payment of them."
The Discussion goes on to note that "only a small fraction of claims lacked documented injuries" and of the Claims without merit that were filed, 1 in 4 resulted in payment. When close calls were excluded, claims without
evidence of injury or error accounted for 13% of total litigation costs.
"Our findings point toward two general conclusions. One is that portraits of a malpractice system that is stricken with frivolous litigation ARE OVERBLOWN. A second conclusion is that the malpractice system performs
reasonably well in its function of separating claims without merit from those with merit and compensating the latter. 3/4 of the litigation outcomes were concordant with the merits of the claim."
"Our findings suggest that moves to curb frivolous litigation, if successful, will have a relatively limited effect on the caseload and costs of litigation. The vast majority of resources go toward resolving and paying claims that involve errors. A higher-value target for reform than discouraging claims that do not belong in the system would be streamlining the processing of claims that do belong."
Also of interest is that the largest newspaper in Oklahoma ran the press release from this politician which presented his skewed results as fact. THe editor of the capitol section of the newspaper was called to task about presenting politcal spin as fact and this is what she had to say: "honestly I can't say that I don't agree with you. Unfortunately things have been crazy up here with the end of session nearing, and I turned a press release into a brief to get it out there without much digging. Not an excuse, just a reality these days. All I can do is assure you that I will be on the lookout more closely in the future for political spin and either wait until I have time to dig into the issue deeper, or not report on a press release at all, from either side. Election year politics at its best. I do appreciate you pointing the study's findings out to me, and I feel confident the issue will come up again with time and space to hopefully provide further insight into the study. Thanks again,"
Now is the public to trust our politicians who are being bought and paid for by insurance companies and doctors lobbying groups? Are we to trust the print media? The answer is to delve into the facts on your own. The internet is a wonderful tool for research and what you will ultimately find is that tort reform, lawsuit reform, or whatever they are calling it today is not needed, rather maybe we should look to insurance reform and start holding bad doctors accountable. Accountability, thats what this issue is above, one side's job is to hold these companies and doctors accountable when they injure someone, while the other sides does not want to be held accountable. My only thought is this, I was raised that when you do something wrong, you stand up and be a man and take responsiblity for it and try to fix it if you can.