Personal Injury Law

Trial Lawyers Become Scapegoats in Health Care Reform

By Steven M. Levin and John J. Perconti

Washington is trying to use trial lawyers as their scapegoats in order to push their tort reform legislation. However, this will do nothing to fix health care and even worse it will do nothing to prevent medical errors. Forty-six states have enacted tort reform, and their health care costs continue to skyrocket. The Congressional Budget Office and Government Accountability Office have said tort reform will save practically no money. They also have found no evidence of so called ?defensive medicine.? Medical malpractice lawsuits are less than 1 percent of all civil filings. The most important statistic is that more than 98,000 people die every year from preventable medical errors. A good suggestion for reducing the number of medical malpractice lawsuits is to decrease the number of medical errors. Patient safety should take a priority. Fewer errors mean fewer people needing medical malpractice lawyers. That is the best way to attack health care. To read the health care opinion, please click the link.

Full post as published by Illinois Medical Malpractice Blog on September 25, 2009 (boomark / email).