...Medical Malpractice Tort Reform in the Healthcare Industry Medical malpractice reform, also known as tort reform, includes strategies to limit medical malpractice costs, deter medical errors and ensure that patients who are injured by medical negligence are fairly compensated. Tort reform has the potential to reduce health care expenditures by reducing the number of malpractice claims, the average size of malpractice awards and tort liability system administrative costs (Medical Malpractice Reform, 2011). Since the 1970s, medical malpractice has been a controversial social issue, which has caused physicians to have increasing concerns about the large number of lawsuits and the negative connotations that tend to go along with them. Physicians have started pushing for legal reforms to decrease the large monetary awards for damages whereas tort attorneys have argued that the negligence suits are an effective way of compensating the victims fairly and forcing the medical professions to follow a proper standard of care (Pozgar, 2013). An article from the Journal of Patient Safety estimates that between 210,000 to 400,000 people die every year in the U.S. from hospital medical errors and 1 in 14 U.S. doctors face a malpractice lawsuit every year (Corapi, 2014). Physicians and healthcare providers argue that the millions of dollars that are awarded in damages increase the cost of healthcare by passing this cost onto the consumer in the form of higher insurance premiums and...
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...Brian Ardizzoni Michael Neil English 1301, Composition 1 25 November 2012 Medical Malpractice For nearly forty years, tort reform constantly becomes an increasingly controversial issue affecting the medical community, the legal community and most of all, the victims of some very unfortunate accidents. Tort reform refers to laws passed on a state-by-state basis which place limits or caps on the type or amount of damages awarded in personal injury lawsuits. Those who advocate medical malpractice tort reform believe limitations should be set on the amount of damages a plaintiff or injured party can be rewarded by the court. These advocates usually include medical professionals and insurance companies. Their argument is that too many frivolous lawsuits lead to high malpractice insurance, the increasing cost of medical care and a burden on the taxpayers whose tax dollars absorb the extravagant litigation costs for these claims. They believe doctors will eventually be unable to practice medicine due to costly malpractice insurance premiums which may leave many Americans unable to obtain much-needed healthcare. In the past, as the rate of malpractice suits began to grow, so did the rate of malpractice insurance. This ended up having a dire impact on the medical profession. For one thing, many qualified doctors ended up leaving their practices and focusing more on preventative medicine. In other words, they...
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...Q: 2 What interest groups favor of Tort Reform and why? Proponents or advocates of Tort Reform support maximizing tort liability because of the ripple effects excessive damages and legal fees have on industries and, by extension, taxpayers. Prices for services and products and products are impacted because of these ripple effects and more often than not make them costlier for consumption. Proponents of tort reform like doctors, hospital and insurance groups argue for reform while the powerful plaintiff bar and certain consumer rights groups argue against it. Arguments for tort reform generally involve medical malpractice torts along with product liability. Cases involving medical malpractice or product liability usually result in heavy penalties for the party rendering services or product. There are direct and indirect costs involved with these penalties. Tort liability has resulted in price increase for many products, for example, stepladders now cost 30% more due to this factor (Huber 1988; Discussion 1989, p. 2237).This may indirectly result in useful products/services not even making to the market. Insurance companies covering tort liability for medical mal practice or product liability have an economic interest in having a cap on the amount of penalties being awarded. It is in their economic interest in maximizing tort liability. Since insurance companies do not know the level of risk they need to insure for such services or products, they cannot...
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...Larrymore April 11, 2011 Group 5 Tort Reform As a society in today’s economy we are constantly being bombarded with news about law suits of one kind or another. It seems whenever we turn on the news there is a new high profile case of malpractice lawsuits and individuals are being sued left and right. We live in a lawsuit happy society that only continues to intensify as the economy continues to recover and citizens continue to seek employment. Often the main bulk of the law suits that make the news and that occur in today’s society are medical malpractice suits. One can find themselves hard pressed to watch T.V. without seeing a commercial or advertisement from an attorney offering to sue someone for something. In the realm of medical law suits the possibilities are seemingly endless. Patients are willing to sue anyone over anything including drug manufacturers, doctors, pharmacists, anesthesiologist and so forth. Malpractice insurance has reached an alarming high and physicians continue to fight for a cap to be placed on money awarded to plaintiffs. Physicians fear their jobs and lives may be in jeopardy if something is not done about these outrageous costs while patients worry that their medical care will suffer if such limits are awarded. In the 1990s there was a famous lawsuit that awarded a woman several million dollars in a law suit against McDonalds when she spilled hot coffee on her lap. Many of the details of the case were not given national attention...
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...Tort Reform All humans on this earth, whether they live in a crowded city, a sparsely populated farming community, a developed or developing nation or a small tribe in the rainforests of the Amazon, have some way by which their civilization is led and regulated for the safety and comfort of its inhabitants. People living together in near proximity need some sort of social control to regulate conduct and relations be it by laws or morals or both. Ivan Nuy, an author who developed the Social Control Theory in 1958, proposed that there are four types of social control: Internal, Indirect, Control with Needs Satisfaction and Direct. Social Control Theory proposes that people's relationships, commitments, values, norms, and moral beliefs encourage them not to break the law. Thus, if moral codes are internalized and individuals are tied into, (their) community, they will voluntarily limit their propensity to commit deviant acts. [ (Nuy, 1958) ] Law is needed for when comfort, morals and disapproval fail to prevent undesirable acts against people in a society. In our country’s system, we have two main types of classifications for justice, civil law and criminal law. Criminal law, under public law, covers laws and regulations that aim to protect all members of the society. Its emphasis is on punishment. Criminal offenders are prosecuted by government officials, who must provide “the burden of proof” to prove the guilt of the defendant beyond a reasonable, doubt, usually a district...
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...Tort reform refers to the proposed changes in the common law civil justice systems that would reduce tort litigation and/or damages. Tort liability imposes significant cost on society. In 1991, US has spent a total of $131.6 billion on tort litigation, which is approximately 2.3% of the gross domestic product (GDP)1 Studies have shown that the citizens pay a tort tax of $1200 per individual or nearly $5000 for a family of four. 2 Today, tort reform is a contentious political issue and its advocates propose procedural limits on the ability to file claims and capping awards of damages. The cost of healthcare in the US is very expensive and is rising rapidly. Tort is one of the main reason this is happening. Tort pay out usually comes from the insurance companies, which eventually raise the insurance cost, and the cost is incurred to everyone paying insurance. In addition, the current medical liability system does not effectively compensate patients from medical negligence nor improve patient safety by addressing system errors. 93% of physicians have started to practice defensive medicine3 in order to avoid getting into lawsuits and this has adversely affected the physician-patient relationship. Physician eliminate complex procedures or procedures that seem litigious. These behaviors have strained and limit physicians to their scope of work, which ends up 1 Kirk W. Dillard, Illinois' Landmark Tort Reform: The Sponsor's Policy Explanation, 27 LOY. U. CHI. L.J. 805, 809 nn.1, 16-17...
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...Issues for the Health Care Professionals I chose to use the medical specialty of medical surgeon for my paper; my reasoning behind this medical specialty is because surgeons account for nearly 50% of all medical malpractice law suits in the country. The bulk of these law suits occur in just 75 of the largest counties , which indicates that most medical malpractice law suits occur in the more densely populated areas which is where the most income is generated. Another 33% of nonsurgical law suits occur in the same 75 counties which when added together account for 83% of all law suits filed in the United States. To put these numbers in the proper context there are thousands of counties in the United States, so what you have is the people in areas like New York, Las Angeles, Atlanta and so on filing thousands of law suits each year. It is estimated that from 1990-2004 there were over 191,804 medical malpractice lawsuits reported to the National Practitioner Databank (NPD) regarding physicians in the United States. It is further estimated that of all the medical law suits filed only about 27% of them were won by the plaintiffs, which can lead a person to believe that there are a lot of frivolous suits being filed. It is estimated that 25% of all doctors in the United States are sued each year, which means that if you are a surgeon you have a better than 1 in 4 chance of getting sued each year that you practice medicine. It must be for love of the profession because with those...
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...Malpractice is defined as “injurious or unprofessional treatment or culpable neglect of a patient by a physician or surgeon” (Webster’s 2005). With the rising costs of healthcare today, some lawmakers, doctors, and hospitals claim that the expensive malpractice insurance that health professionals are required to carry is a contributing factor to the rise in the cost of health care. (Connolly, Ceci 2004). Awards capping is not a new principle for Americans. Much like we hear about salary caps for baseball teams some states including Ohio have legislated laws that put a limit on the amount that a patient can receive in a lawsuit for pain and suffering. The law now states that largest amount that a plaintiff can win is 250,000. Although the amount for lost wages will not be capped, states would like to place a value on a person’s quality of life. Medical malpractice awards capping is not a solution to the rising costs of healthcare. There are two sides to every story. The issue of awards capping is no different. On one side we have medical doctors, hospitals and a conservative government concerned about rising healthcare and insurance costs. On the other we have families, children and health care advocates who claim that a capping system would not be influential in affecting prices for health care or malpractice insurance. The ABA considers capping not only to be a bad idea, but ineffective as well “The American Bar association strongly refutes any such contention …empirical date...
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...Ebony Stewart May 7, 2014 Estimating Health Care Associated Infections and Deaths in U.S Hospitals as Oppose to Medical Malpractice Epidemiology Introduction This study was conducted for two important reasons. Deaths in the United States as well as an estimation to provide information for the number of healthcare-associated infections (HAI) were the purpose. The data sources used were 1) National Nosocomial Infections Surveillance 2) National Hospital Discharge Survey and 3) American Hospital Association all of these sources were used by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s. HAI occur in many different healthcare settings: acute care within hospitals, same day surgery centers, long-term facilities, and ambulatory outpatient care in health care clinics. HAI has resulted from and adverse reaction to toxins and evidence of infection isn’t presented during time of admission to hospital. Surveillance has also been a research base for HAI. NNIS is an ongoing system that has collaborated with CDC to monitor data on HAI”S and other nosocomial infections. It covers intensive care units, high risk nursery, and surgical patients. A major goal of NNIS is to develop data to prevent and control nosocomial diseases. NHDS was designed to meet needs of patients from non-federal hospitals that stayed only for a short period of time. The data collected from these surveys is collected to examine the importance of public health. The survey is conducted in three difference...
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...the increased mortality of this group. Bonnel (2000) notes that younger individuals are dying of this disease, which translates to a decreased taxable population and reduction in resources for public expenditures. Medications such as antiretrovirals are very expensive. Henderson (2002) points out that drug therapy costs up to $16,000 dollars per infected individual per year. Additional economic impact can be thought of in terms of lost productivity, and lost days from work, which account for a significant impact on the labor supply. With regard to substance abuse, Henderson (2002) states “substance abuse is the leading health problem in the United States today” (p. 310). Costs associated with substance abuse include increased costs of medical care, lost productivity from work, and increased rates of crime. Henderson also mentions that in 1995, drug abuse cost the United States $110 billion dollars. Violent crimes are fairly widespread in the United States today and include hate crimes, domestic violence, and homicides. The vast majority of violent crime victims will seek treatment from emergency rooms, leading to overcrowding in these departments and at a...
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...Medical Malpractice and Quality of Care: With the increase in costs of malpractice insurance for doctors, how is our quality of care affected and what can be done about it? Rising malpractice insurance affects everyone seeking medical care and should be a cause for serious concern. At first, the health care industry saw rising premiums as only a temporary backlash from a couple of lawsuits with multimillion dollar jury awards. Therefore, health care administrators, insurance companies, and public officials worried little about planning for the snow-balling crisis that exists today. People blame greedy lawyers and generous juries for the problem; however, I feel that more than one cause led to our current situation. Today, administrators and lawmakers debate the best solution to this dilemma. Many suggest that by merely capping monetary damages awarded, malpractice rates will stabilize. I disagree. I believe that monetary caps must occur to help with the costs, but I also feel that patient/public awareness is essential to the stabilization of insurance premiums. After the first multimillion dollar award in a medical malpractice lawsuit, physicians still felt safe because they believed juries would place little or no emphasis on non-economic damages – awards unrelated to medical costs, lost salary, etc. However, the lawsuits kept coming and the awards, especially for non-economic damages, kept escalating. According to the New York Times, “the average jury...
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...ram4577X_ch03.qxd 4/16/04 11:50 Page 37 Legal and Ethical Issues in Medical Practice, Including HIPAA AREAS OF COMPETENCE 2003 Role Delineation Study CLINICAL Fundamental Principles ɀ Apply principles of aseptic technique and infection control ɀ Comply with quality assurance practices Patient Care ɀ Coordinate patient care information with other health-care providers GENERAL Legal Concepts ɀ Perform within legal and ethical boundaries ɀ Prepare and maintain medical records ɀ Document accurately ɀ Follow employer’s established policies dealing with the health-care contract ɀ Implement and maintain federal and state health-care legislation and regulations ɀ Comply with established risk management and safety procedures ɀ Recognize professional credentialing criteria CHAPTER OUTLINE ɀ ɀ ɀ ɀ Medical Law and Ethics OSHA Regulations Quality Control and Assurance Code of Ethics ɀ HIPAA ɀ Confidentiality Issues and Mandatory Disclosure OBJECTIVES After completing Chapter 3, you will be able to: 3.1 Define ethics, bioethics, and law. 3.2 Discuss the measures a medical practice must take to avoid malpractice claims. 3.3 Describe OSHA requirements for a medical office. KEY TERMS abandonment agent arbitration assault authorization battery bioethics breach of contract civil law contract crime criminal law defamation disclosure durable power of attorney electronic transaction record ethics expressed contract felony fraud ...
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...THE UNIVERSITY OF ZAMBIA SCHOOL OF EDUCATION DEPARTMENT OF LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL SCIENCES DEPARTMENT NAME : LIMPO NAMAKAU COMPUTER NO : 11053909 COURSE : CVE 3020 LECTURER : MR. CHIDONGO PHIRI TASK : ASSIGNMENT (1) ONE LENGTH : BETWEEN 12 and 30 TYPED PAGES DUE DATE : 30th JANUARY, 2014. QUESTION : Critically discuss how the study of Public Legal Education would help school managers analyse the following; i). Public Nuisance ii). Negligence of girl child iii). Abortion Practices iv). Examination Malpractice Without rules and regulations, society would be impossible to have because freedom without boundaries results in anarchy which means total confusion. From birth, human beings’ lives, safety, health and peace are controlled by law. It is for this reason that this piece of work seeks to critically discuss how the study of public legal education would help school managers analyze public nuisance, negligence of the girl child, abortion practices and examination malpractices. According to Johari (1989), law is a set of rules which society develops for itself to control the behaviours of its members towards one another. Migel et al (2005) defines public as something that is not owned privately but in common, while legal is a word used to refer to issues, things, activities or information to do with how or what the law requires (Cooper, 1978). For a rule to be recognized as a law there should be a way of compelling people to obey it and this is done...
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...Providers will experience an increased burden in many aspects of their medical profession including new legal practicing liabilities, less autonomy, administrative encumbrances, shortages of primary care physicians, and political infringement (Horton, Hollier 2012). The provider is to maintain high quality of care while the ACA’s agenda is cost and quantity over quality. The Affordable Care Act is the largest piece of legislative reform in American history relating to health care. The impact to our economy on many levels of scale and our constitutional rights are all being questioned and debated without a definitive answer to long term reality of its implications. Reform is necessitous to the continuance of providing care, controlling fraudulent activities and waste, as well as, exploring new innovative ways to maintain a high level of quality services within the legalities of our legislative branch. The balance of these aspects have been challenging and perplexing in materializing the reforms into fruition. The concentration during reform has been on quantity of the insured population, effects on businesses as in tax benefits, taxation, and the CMS. The ACA, legislatively is in the beginning stages to reform health care. Thus far the application of reform are in disarray as it is on the operating table cut wide open and bleeding out, without a surgeon in the room. The complexity has the medical society and American constituents confused and anxious of its impact...
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...CONTROLLING HEALTH CARE COSTS WHILE PROMOTING THE BEST POSSIBLE HEALTH OUTCOMES American College of Physicians A White Paper 2009 Controlling Health Care Costs While Promoting the Best Possible Health Outcomes Summary of Position Paper Approved by the ACP Board of Regents, September 2009 What are the Major Drivers of Health Care Costs? Major drivers of health care costs include: inappropriate utilization especially of advanced medical technology, lack of patient involvement in decision-making, payment system distortions that encourage over-use, high prices for health care services, a health care workforce that is not aligned with national needs, excessive administrative costs, medical liability and defensive medicine, more Americans with declining health status and chronic disease, and demographic changes including an increase in elderly persons. This paper addresses each of these drivers of health care costs and provides recommendations for controlling them. Why Do We Need to Control Health Care Costs? Improvements in health care have the ability to provide opportunities for all people to live better, healthier lives. However, the rate of increase in U.S. spending on health care continues to exceed economic growth at an unsustainable pace. The rate of growth in health care spending is the single most important factor undermining the nation’s long-term fiscal condition. Why Should Controlling Health Care Costs be Linked to Promoting Good Health Outcomes? Increasing pressure...
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