While the Obama administration pushes for national health insurance, expensive overuse of technology based on the defensive practice of medicine by doctors is not being considered at all. Doctors over order tests and treatments for fear of missing a remote diagnosis. Doctors are afraid of being sued by aggressive trial lawyers who lobby Congress against real reform.
Though 98,000 people die in U.S. hospitals every year from medical mistakes, at the same time according to a recent Harvard study, 40 percent of malpractice lawsuits are not legitimate, though they lead to 15 percent of the money paid out. Often times the doctors who are sued did nothing wrong, while those who make mistakes too often escape retribution.
Most malpractice cases are won by doctors, but they suffer a long-extended process first where they must meet with lawyers. I know many doctors who have quit medicine or become even more defensive and ordered more unnecessary tests as a result. I remember when the best urologist and one of the top cardiologists at my hospital quit practice abruptly because of extended lawsuits where they weren't at fault.
On the defense side, lawyers milk doctors for billable time, and on the plaintiff side, ambulance chasers thrive, creating and exploiting frivolous cases for profit.
Many patients get unnecessary operations because of defensive medicine. C-section is on the rise and is vastly overdone because of doctors fearing lawsuits. There is a culture of fear that motivates doctors to practice defensively, which causes costs to skyrocket.
With rationing of care that is inevitable under the Obama health care reform, especially with a public option, malpractice will skyrocket because tests and procedures will be denied and doctors will be blamed. Yet we doctors are too busy and too scared of being singled out to band together to resist.
What is the solution? One solution is to create state review boards like Michigan has to limit frivolous lawsuits. Doctors and lawyers can serve on these boards together and provide a barrier to nuisance suits. More peer review in the hospitals is also a good idea, regular mortality and morbidity conferences where doctors behavior is examined without the fear of lawsuits.
Capping pain and suffering awards would seem like a simple enough solution, but some patients truly deserve a high reward if they've been badly mistreated by a physician (as when the wrong organ is removed or a diagnosis is blatantly missed). A better approach is to target nuisance suits for destruction.
Dr. Marc Siegel is an internist and associate professor of medicine at the NYU School of Medicine. He is a FOX News medical contributor and writes a health column for the LA Times, where he examines TV and movies for medical accuracy. Dr. Siegel is the author of "False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear"and "Bird Flu: Everything You Need to Know About the Next Pandemic." Read more at www.doctorsiegel.com
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