03 May Medical Errors and Plaintiff’s Rights
While the health care industry and insurance companies were busy limiting the ability of victims to recover damages from preventable medical errors through tort reform, the number of people severely injured or killed due to medical malpractice sky rocketed. Insurance company lobbyists and propagandists have successfully painted plaintiff’s and their attorneys as bloodsuckers bent on forcing health care costs through the roof and driving doctors out of practice and out of town. In truth, there is no evidence of a correlation, much less causation, between plaintiff recovery and America’s ever increasing health care costs.
This isn’t about suing doctors when things go wrong beyond their control, it’s about holding them to the standard of care in their field. Excuse the rough analogy; but if you paid a mechanic for a brake job on your son’s car and he hooked the fuel line to the brakes and the brakes to the motor and the car exploded in a fireball, should the mechanic be held responsible? Isn’t that part of the contract – that the mechanic exercise reasonable care?
You don't hear people complaining about exploding Pintos driving up the cost of vehicles.
Plaintiff’s attorneys have the ability to be a clearly needed check on the system, to hold bad doctors accountable, and to help patients who suffered at the hands of those bad doctors recover damages. Healthcare is a product and when the provider of that product is defective and inflicting unnecessary harm and sometimes death on the paying consumer, it’s time to allow them to be recompensed.
Can you believe that medical errors in hospitals and other health-care facilities are the third-leading cause of death in the United States? Read this article from The Washington Post to find out more.