Consumer Law

Actually Pulling the Plug on Grandma: Seniors? Legal Rights Endangered While One in Seven Harmed in Hospitals

By Joe Consumer

Here?s a great idea to solve the budget deficit. Let?s take Medicare patients, one out of seven of whom are killed or injured due to preventable errors in hospitals (according to an ?alarming? new HHS Office of Inspector General study), and then enact a national ?cap? on non-economic compensation, which are known to disproportionately hurt senior citizens, forcing Medicare to pay for their care instead of the culpable hospital?s insurance company. That?s at least $4.4 billion a year (and probably a lot more for patients in states with tort reform, where seniors are shut out of court.)

That, my friend, is no savings. However, it is one of the ?not so well thought out? ideas of the Co-Chairs of the deficit reduction commission, which we covered the other day and consumer groups wrote about here.

Why do non-economic damages ?caps? disproportionately hurt seniors, like these Medicare patients? Because caps make their cases economically impossible for attorneys bring. The same goes for any injured person who does not have high wages, like women who work inside the home, children and the poor, who are more likely to receive a greater percentage of their compensation in the form of non-economic damages if they are injured.  You don?t have to look too far to prove that point. It has already happened in states with non-economic damages caps already ? like California:

The situation stirred well-known insurance defense attorney Robert Baker, who defended malpractice suits for more than 20 years, to tell Congress about the problem. "As a result of the caps on damages, most of the exceedingly competent plaintiff's lawyers in California simply will not handle a malpractice case," Baker told the House Judiciary Committee in 1994 on behalf of the American Board of Trial Advocates. "There are entire categories of cases that have been eliminated since malpractice reform was implemented in California."

As to the HHS study, 180,000 patient die each year as well, which is far more than the Institute of Medicine?s earlier estimates, although in this new deficit- reduction frenzy, no one seems to care about them. Death is a lot less burdensome on taxpayers.  In other words, want to find those death panels everyone was "fear-mongering" about during the health care debate? Just go down to your local hospital.

Full post as published by ThePopTort on November 16, 2010 (boomark / email).