Showing posts with label medical malpractice. Show all posts

25 August 2011

Rick Perry says Texas added 21,000 doctors because of tort reform from POLITIFACT 25AUG11

CHRISTIAN rick perry finds it necessary to lie about the effect tort reform had in Texas. No big surprise there, his campaign is based on lies, distortions, manipulations and propaganda because without all the smoke and mirrors people will see him for what he is, a political whore being pimped by corporate America and tea-baggers...

The Truth-O-Meter Says:

Says Texas gained 21,000 doctors due to tort reform.

Rick Perry on Wednesday, August 17th, 2011 in a speech at "Politics and Eggs" in Bedford, N.H.

Rick Perry says Texas added 21,000 doctors because of tort reform

Ask any Republican candidate about reducing the cost of health care and part of the answer is likely to include rewriting the rules for medical malpractice. In 2003, Texas lawmakers passed a package of changes to malpractice law, plus the state added a few more through a referendum known as Proposition 12.

These turned the state into a beacon of hope among tort reformers and Texas Gov. Rick Perry talks proudly of the good the changes have done.

When he was asked about medical malpractice at the Politics and Eggs Breakfast in Bedford, N.H., on Aug. 17, 2011, he had some precise numbers at his fingertips. "I’ll tell you what one of the results was," he said. "This last year, 21,000 more physicians practicing medicine in Texas because they know they can do what they love and not be sued. Some 30 counties that didn’t have an emergency room doc have one today. Counties along the Rio Grande, where women were having to travel for miles and miles outside of the county to see an ob-gyn, for prenatal care and now they have that care."

For this fact-check, we're examining his claim that that the state gained 21,000 doctors because of tort reform.

First, we found the number is wrong.

Perry’s campaign relies on data from the Texas Medical Association, a physician trade group, which counts the number of medical licenses issued in Texas. The problem is, not everyone with such a license practices in Texas.

The Texas Medical Board issues licenses and tracks whether those doctors actually work in the state. According to their numbers, between 2003 and 2011, the accurate increase is 12,788. That’s about 8,000 doctors fewer than the governor’s claim.

Still, thousands of additional physicians is nothing to sneeze at, and the next question is, can credit be put at the feet of tort reform?

Not much. By far, the biggest driver is population growth. From 2002 to 2010, the population of Texas grew by 20 percent. At the same time, the number of doctors went up 24 percent.

Jon Opelt, executive director of Texas Alliance for Patient Access, a group that supports tort reform and is funded by health care providers, sent us some analysis he had done that filtered out the population effect. Opelt said the higher rate for doctors -- 24 percent -- translates into an additional 1,608 physicians thanks to tort reform.

At least, that’s what he said when we first spoke to him. Later, after we showed him that the growth of doctors increased at a faster rate in the pre-reform years, Opelt sent us new numbers, saying tort reform brought 5,000 more doctors to the state and the ratio of doctors to residents has never been better. (We found those numbers to be a stretch: The upward revision comes from including administrators, teachers and other licensed doctors who don’t actually treat patients.)

In any event, from the pro-reform vantage point, the most accurate figure is 5,000 -- a far cry from 21,000.

But the case for Perry’s statement gets even shakier when you review numbers prior to the new malpractice rules. It turns out that in the nine years before tort reform, the number of doctors grew twice as fast as the population. So Texas did a pretty good job attracting doctors before the law changed.

Tom Banning, chief executive officer of the Texas Academy of Family Physicians, said that back in the early 1990’s the state began passing laws that made it physician-friendly. Among them, a prompt-pay rule to "to ensure that insurers pay physicians promptly and correctly," Banning said, "which creates a very good environment for practices."

Banning said tort reform was more good news for doctors, a sentiment borne out by opinion surveys from the state’s medical association. But he acknowledges that population growth is the biggest force behind the growing ranks of doctors. "It’s like the Willie Sutton rule," Banning said, referring to the famous bank robber. "Go where the money is. From a doctor’s standpoint, you go where the patients are."

Especially patients who can pay. Banning and other observers in Texas note that most of the new doctors are clustered in the affluent, fast growing suburbs around the state’s biggest cities.

This puts a damper on one of Perry’s additional points, that tort reform opens the doors for physicians to practice in the state’s most rural counties. The results here are mixed. The governor is right about emergency room doctors. The state has 60 percent more of them then it did in 2003 and tort reform likely played a major role, experts told us. ER doctors got more protections from tort reform than just about any other medical specialty.

But Perry also boasted that rural counties were getting specialists in obstetrics and gynecology that they never had before. The reality here is murkier. A report from the Texas Alliance for Patient Access says 14 counties (of 254 total) gained an ob-gyn. We looked at one community along the Rio Grande River, Starr County, and found that yes, four years after tort reform, they got one. But the situation has flipped back and forth, and as of May 2011, Starr County had no ob-gyn specialist.

Our ruling

There is no question that tort reform drove down medical malpractice insurance premiums and reduced the number of malpractice suits. And there is no question that most health care providers like the change and say it’s a factor that leads them to practice in the state. But the wholesale transformation that Perry describes is not backed up by the numbers.

Perry said Texas has 21,000 more doctors thanks to tort reform. That’s flat out wrong. Texas has only about 13,000 more doctors in the state and the historic trends suggest that population growth was the driving factor. We rate his statement False.
Published: Thursday, August 25th, 2011 at 4:35 p.m.
Subjects: Health Care, Legal Issues, New Hampshire 2012
Sources:
New Hampshire Public Radio, Perry claims doctor boom thanks to tort reform, Aug, 17, 2011

Texas Medical Board, Physician Demographics Data, accessed Aug. 19, 2011

Texas Department of State Health Services, Direct Patient Care Physicians, accessed Aug. 19, 2011

HB 4, Texas Tort Reform Bill, 2003, accessed Aug. 19, 2011

American Medical Association, HB 4 Summary, accessed Aug. 19, 2011

American Tort Reform Association, "How Tort Reform Works",accessed Aug. 19, 2011

Texas Medical Association, "Proposition 12 Produces Healthy Benefits", accessed Aug. 22, 2011

Interview and email correspondence with Jon Opelt, Executive Director, Texas Alliance for Patient Access, Aug. 19-24, 2011

Texas Alliance for Patient Access, "14 Texas Counties Add Obstetricians", accessed Aug. 19, 2011

Texas Alliance for Patient Access, "Losers Turned Gainers in Primary Care", accessed Aug. 19, 2011

Texas Alliance for Patient Access, "86 Texas Counties See Gains in ER Docs", accessed Aug. 24, 2011

Interview with Leigh Hopper, Public Information Officer, Texas Medical Board, Aug. 19, 2011

Interview with Tom Banning, CEO, Texas Academy of Family Physicians, Aug. 24, 2011

Interview with Rebecca Conditt, Executive Director, Texas Rural Health Association, Aug. 24, 2011

Statewide Health Coordinating Council, 2011-2016 State Health Plan, accessed Aug. 24, 2011

Journal of the American Academy of Surgeons, "Malpractice risk and cost are significantly reduced after tort reform", accessed Aug. 22, 2011

Interview with Alex Winsow, Texas Watch, Aug. 22, 2011

07 April 2011

Malpractice Bill Sponsor (rep phil gingrey r GA) Target of Many Suits Himself 9FEB11 & Hospitals: Way More Dangerous Than You Thought 7APR11

FOR all the talk about the need for tort reform because of the financial burden insurance premiums on the medical profession, I have to say, even in the very rural, economically depressed (since the reagan economic miracle) part of NW PA I am from there aren't any poverty stricken medical professionals. This from Mother Jones......

Republicans in Congress have offered up little in the way of new health care proposals. After retaking control of the House this year, they revived an old failed measure that would severely limit lawsuits against negligent doctors, drug companies that kill people, and companies that make defective pacemakers and other medical devices. The Republicans claim that curbing such suits would significantly reduce health care spending, a claim that's been disproven many times over. What the bill would do is protect doctors and other health care providers who harm people through bad medicine.
Case in point is one of the very congressmen sponsoring the bill, Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.). In 2007, the New York Times reports, Gingrey, who is a doctor, settled a lawsuit for $500,000 in a case involving a pregnant woman whose appendicitis Gingrey and others failed to diagnose. Her appendix burst, causing a massive infection that left her unborn child dead and the woman partially disabled after she suffered a stroke as a result.
That wasn't the only time Gingrey has been sued. The Times writes:

In a pretrial deposition, Dr. Gingrey testified that he had been sued at least three other times over malpractice during his long career. In one case, a jury found against him; in another case, there was a settlement; and in another case, the patient dropped the action, he testified.

It's no suprise that the doctors who get sued a lot are the ones who complain the loudest about "frivolous" lawsuits. But the case against Gingrey seems anything but frivolous. But it's just those sorts of serious cases that Gingrey's bill would restrict. And far from saving money, the bill would simply shift the cost of negligent medicine from the doctors and their insurance companies to the taxpayers through Medicaid and other disability programs. Private health insurers also can often recoup their costs for covering malpractice injuries through those lawsuits. Catastrophic injuries like the one suffered by Gingrey's patient profiled in the Times tend to bankrupt people, leaving them reliant on government health care, and the costs can be significant.
In 2004, the state of Nevada was considering a measure similar to Gingrey's bill that would have capped pain and suffering awards at $350,000 and made it harder for plaintiffs to collect on court judgments against doctors. Evidence provided to the state supreme court showed that malpractice lawsuits had returned more than $6 million to the state Medicaid program in the previous five years, and that the state program for indigent health care would have been entitled to more than $4 million in a single case that was pending at the time. None of that money would have returned to the taxpayers if the lawsuit restrictions had been in place at the time. Despite what Republicans want to believe, making malpractice lawsuits disappear doesn't make the health care costs of medical errors go away. It simply means that it's just not the wrongdoers who pay for them.
Oh, and as a side note: Gingrey doesn't seem to be paying much attention to the affairs in his home state. In 2005, Georgia passed a cap on malpractice damages much like the one Gingrey would like to impose on the whole country. Last year, in a 7-0 decision, the Georgia Supreme Court threw out the law, calling it a huge violation to the constitutional right to a jury trial, and one that infringed on the separation of powers. Not only is Gingrey's bill bad health care policy, it's likely to be bad law, too.

Hospitals: Way More Dangerous Than You Thought

— By Stephanie Mencimer

| Thu Apr. 7, 2011 10:16 AM PDT

Under the guise of trying to make health care more affordable, House Republicans this week have been debating a measure that would make it much harder for people injured by the health care system to sue doctors or hospitals. Their timing hasn't been great. A day after a hearing on the medical malpractice bill, the journal Health Affairs released the findings of a new study that found that medical errors are way, way more common than anyone thought.
Ten years ago, the Institute of Medicine reported that preventable medical errors killed 98,000 people a year. But Health Affairs reports that the number is likely far higher, in large part because the data on those errors was collected through a voluntary reporting system. And as anyone who's ever looked at malpractice lawsuits knows, no one in the health care system ever wants to voluntarily admit to making a mistake.
So the researchers started tracking errors at three hospitals themselves. As a result, they found that voluntary reporting missed 90 percent of the errors that took place in those hospitals. The study found that 1 in every 3 hospital admissions resulted in an adverse event, a figure that should make everyone shudder. A mere 10 types of errors made up nearly two-thirds of all the adverse events, conditions that included pressure sores and post-op infections—things that don't take rocket science to prevent. The cost of all these errors is high: as much as $17 billion every year, all from hospital screw ups that could be prevented. Perhaps Republicans looking to reduce health care spending should try going after medical errors rather than the people who suffer because of them.

NORTON META TAG

25 August 2011