What about medical liability reform?

Doctors are bitterly disappointed in the governor”™s exclusion of meaningful medical liability reform from the negotiated budget agreement.

The agreement comes after winning our cooperation to cut Medicaid costs by restricting our ability to prescribe expensive medications, taxing our practices and asking us to accept very low-paying managed care contracts to treat the neediest New Yorkers.

Once again, we are protecting a legal system that encourages a trial bar lottery mentality to hunt for that one multimillion-dollar case that is a bonanza for law firms, rather than the vast majority of medical errors affecting most patients.

In the landmark Harvard Medical Practice Study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the doctor negligent error rate was 1.3 percent of hospital admissions, whereas the law firm error rate was 98.5 percent (eight claims out of 280 patients identified as having been exposed to medical errors.)

State hospitals currently pay $1.6 billion in annual malpractice insurance with the trial lawyers collecting $352 million ”“ $105 million from non-economic damages. In contrast, out of the $34 billion spent on Medicaid in all of New York state in 2007, only $268 million went to pay for physicians”™ services. Only in a state where we allow trial attorneys to double as members of the Legislature can the malpractice premiums be the highest in the land.

Thank God the law firms have such a high legal negligence rate that 80 percent of all claims are settled in favor of the physician.  Right now a young neurosurgeon starting practice in New York state will have to find $250,000 to pay his malpractice premium before he treats his first patient. Yet in California, where they enacted the same reforms 25 years ago, the same premium is only $87,000. “Go west young man!”

Dr. Joseph J. Tartaglia

President

Westchester County Medical Society