Personal Injury Law

Medical Malpractice Limits on Recoveries

Our medical malpractice attorneys are frequently forced to decline cases which have merit from a liability standpoint, but due to caps on the amount of recovery cannot be justified in economic terms.

Last week, the Los Angeles Times ran a story concerning a 72 year old woman who entered Stanford University Medical Center for double knee replacement surgery in April. Four days later, she was dead. Her son, an anesthesiologist, felt that the case was a classic case of medical malpractice. After the operation, his mother developed sharp abdominal pain which she described as a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. The hospital failed to diagnose the cause of her pain and continued to treat her with pain relievers. Her vital signs became unstable and she was moved to an intensive care unit, but she died of complications from an undiagnosed and untreated bowel obstruction.

According to the story, state regulators found the hospital at fault and cited it. The anesthesiologist and his family decided to sue and approached 24 lawyers. All the lawyers declined to take the case for the same reason - the medical malpractice caps on the amount of recovery didn?t justify the expenses.

California law limits pain and suffering awards in medical malpractice cases to $250,000. Unless there is a large economic loss, the cost of bringing these types of lawsuits can exceed the limit of recovery. Similarly, Georgia?s $350,000 cap prevents many lawyers from taking cases involving elderly people, unemployed persons, and young people.

The anesthesiologist, who once was an advocate of so-called ?tort reform? now opposes it. Almost 30 states have enacted similar legislation, and two Republican presidential candidates, Mitt Romney and Rudolph Guiliani have recently endorsed a national approach to limits on recoveries.

Several states have set their malpractice caps considerably higher because of worries that they unfairly affect poor patients the most. In fact, some states have begun to examine the fairness of these caps especially, those not tied to the cost of inflation. The elected officials in Georgia seem content to allow the caps to remain in place.

Full post as published by Georgia Injury Lawyer Blog on January 17, 2008 (boomark / email).