Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Legal Medicine

With the ferrocity that our trial lawyers defend our present tort system, I though well, if it is so good why dont we apply it to our medical system? WhiteCoat has an excellent report of it at his blog. Just think of it. If you have finances and the wherewithall when you are sick, you can hire the best consultants for your case and if you win your battle with sickness your doctor(attorney) would then be entitled to at least 1/3 of all future earnings plus expenses. Of course, your actual care would be determined by a group of your peers who have been carefully selected to weed out anyone with medical knowledge or higher education after years of trivial motions and billable hours. The insurance companies could then hire their own doctor(lawyers) to argue the opposite. Since this is now like our tort system, if you do not have any resouces you must find a doctor(lawyer) willing to take the case but if there is no money in it, you are out of luck. On the otherside you can always try to file for a frivoulous care in the hopes of making it big. You know like getting a liver transplant when you just need your gallbladder out.

The good news, Obama is a lawyer and so is most of his team.

1 comment:

SeaSpray said...

Good morning Throckmorton. :)

Yes... I agree... WC's post was excellent.

It's all so complicated.

I just wish y'all could practice medicine unhindered by all the regulations, etc., that insurance companies were fair (oxymoron?)to both providers and patients and that society wasn't so litigious... so docs could remain focused on what they trained to do and have more time with the patients and for their personal lives instead of rushing to get the patients in and out and having to put in such long hours because of how the system pays them.

Did you see the post in Kevin MD about the urologist getting sued because he neglected to tell the patient he had lung cancer?

What a sad case! I don't understand the jury's reasoning there and yet if she sued everyone..she'd probably have won.

How in the world he could say it wasn't his responsibility to inform him when he was the ordering doc for the x-ray is beyond me. And doesn't the radiologist have to get in touch w/the patient? Apparently not.

They do for mammos and ultra sounds.

And then contrast this case with the frivolous ones that DO win.

Hey.. wouldn't it be nice if you were entitled to 1/3 of all future earnings ..plus expenses? :)