Personal Injury Law

Medical Malpractice Lawsuits: How Strong Is the Link to Defensive Medicine?

According to Harvard University economist Amitabh Chandra, annual jury awards and legal settlements involving doctors amount to $3.6 billion, a drop in the bucket in a country that spends $2.3 trillion annually on health care.

Medical malpractice reform advocates claim that this does not account for defensive medicine. They rely in part on 2005 JAMA study that found that over 90 percent of doctors admit to practicing defensive medicine. President Obama?s speech to the AMA last week certainly led them to believe that he agreed that we need to ?scale back the excessive defensive medicine? in this country.

Let us not pretend that there is no defensive medicine in this country. But we have to take out of the medical malpractice equation three kinds of defensive medicine: (1) tests and evaluation that are actually good for the patients, (2) additional treatment that is motivated, not by fear of lawsuits, but by fear of harm to the patient, and (3) patient induced defensive medicine (i.e. patient seeks tests doctor would not necessarily recommend).

Full post as published by Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog on June 24, 2009 (boomark / email).