Bush 'tort reform': Texas patients can't find lawyer to take their case

[kurth]

Lawsuit limit may be just what the doctors ordered
Travis E. Poling, Express-News Business Writer

Two years after Texas voters reined in jury awards for medical malpractice, the medical community appears to have gotten everything it wanted: More doctors and fewer lawyers suing them. On the flip side, lawyers who have made a career handling medical malpractice cases — including those who defend doctors and hospitals — are starting to look elsewhere for work.

And patients who believe doctors or medical institutions have injured them say they can't find a lawyer to take their case. This is the new doctor-friendly Texas and the model for what President Bush would like to see duplicated on a national scale.

Texas has about 3,000 new doctors since 2003, when Proposition 12 capped non-economic awards for medical malpractice against doctors and hospitals at $250,000 per defendant. While proponents of the law hold this to be a significant number of new doctors, an analysis of data from the Board of Medical Examiners shows that rate of increase in Texas isn't significantly higher than before the change.

< snip >

Not all are convinced, however, that there was a crisis to begin with. A study of Texas medical malpractice claims found no correlation between jury awards to patients and higher health costs or doctors' malpractice insurance rates. Professors at the University of Illinois and the University of Texas at Austin analyzed 150,000 Texas insurance claims filed between 1998 and 2002 and found that overall increases in medical malpractice claims, claim amounts and jury awards didn't increase. Jury verdicts awarding more than $1 million stayed steady at about 6 percent of all claims between 1991 and 2002. Proponents of Proposition 12 sold the referendum, in part, on the premise that Texas had huge jury awards against doctors and hospitals. The study authors concluded that claims had less to do with the rising medical liability premiums paid by doctors than the condition of the insurance market. Insurance rates tend to be lower when the financial markets are doing well. But when the investment market isn't so good, the premiums tend to go up...

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/medical/stories/MYSA022606.01A.MedMalpractice.35db3b8.html

[demosincebirth]

1. I guess the cost of health care, in Texas, will come

down. Isn't that what they say is suppose to happen?

[The Backlash Cometh]

2. Soylent Green is people!

I tell you, what they did to those people in NOLA by euthanizing them is what's going to eventually happen if this trend continues.

[justgamma]

3. I'm glad Texas did this.

Now all the incompetent doctors have some place to practice.