Posts Tagged ‘doctors’
Saturday, March 15th, 2008
A California jury cleared a cardiologist and a radiologist Friday of negligence in the diagnosis and treatment of actor John Ritter, who died of a torn aorta in 2003.
Jurors said the majority believed the cardiologist summoned to the hospital after Ritter was diagnosed with a heart attack had no time to order a chest X-ray that might have found the tear.
They also said the radiologist, who gave Ritter a body scan two years earlier, did advise Ritter of coronary problems and to consult other doctors, but his failure to do so did not cause his death.
Tags: doctors, Jury
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Friday, March 14th, 2008
Actor Dennis Quaid recently appeared on “60 Minutes” to discuss his kids’ medical malpractice case (follow the link to a video clip of part of his interview with Steve Kroft).
Quaid twins Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace nearly died last November at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles when they were mistakenly given a massive drug overdose.
Quaid believes such mistakes occur too often. “They happen in every hospital in every state in this country and…I’ve come to find out, there’s 100,000 people a year killed…in hospitals by medical mistakes,” he tells Kroft. “It’s bigger than AIDS. It’s bigger than breast cancer. It’s bigger than automobile accidents and yet, no one seems to be really aware of the problem,” says Quaid.
The Quaid twins were mistakenly given the drug Heparin, an adult-strength blood thinner, instead of Hep-lock, a version of the drug a thousand times weaker that’s routinely used to clear IV lines in pediatric patients. It caused the infants, who were in the hospital for a suspected infection, serious hemorrhaging. “Our kids are bleeding from everyplace that they’ve punctured…They were working on Boone, whose belly button would not stop bleeding…blood squirted across the room…. It was blood everywhere,” recalls Quaid. “It was a life-and-death situation.”
Tags: doctors, malpractice
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Thursday, January 10th, 2008
Here’s an interesting article from CNN series “Empowered Patient.”
Since “tort reform” passed in 2003, it’s made it extremely difficult for many injured patients to find competent lawyers to file medical malpractice suits. I’ve lost count of how many injured folks we’ve had to turn away because the expenses of bringing a malpractice suit far outweigh the potential recovery because of damage caps. This article offers some suggestions on steps an aggrieved patient might take with the doctor and/or hospital to make things somewhat right.
I would add to those suggestions that patients can contact the Texas Medical Board and file a complaint against a physician. The Board, at least ostensibly, is supposed to investigate and reprimand negligent physicians.
Tags: doctors, lawyers, malpractice
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Monday, December 17th, 2007
Back in 2003, when the Texas Legislature bent over for the insurance lobby and capped damages on suits brought by victims of medical negligence, the justification for selling off our rights was typically some variant of a “crisis” facing doctors…too many “frivolous suits,” too many “runaway juries,” too high insurance premiums, too many doctors fleeing the state, etc., etc.
One of the solutions proposed by consumer groups back then was, sensibly, insurance reform. That is, the Legislature should take steps to rein in the insurers, or subsidize premiums for doctors in high-risk specialties or underserved areas, etc. Makes sense. But the insurers and the aligned big money interests wanted no part of that…don’t mess with the invisible hand of the free market, they said, despite the fact that they were charging more for less coverage in order to make up for bad business decisions made along the way (losses in the stock market, poor management, and so forth). So now we have Draconian damage caps and other hurdles affecting consumers but nothing to reform or stabilize the insurance market. Nada. Zip.
Apparently the same “crisis” was hyped in Maryland several years ago, when that state’s legislature contemplated ways to save their doctors. The state implemented a subsidy paid to the insurers to help the docs manage the higher premiums, the same proposal that went over like a lead balloon here in Texas.
The
Washington Post reports that Gov.
Martin O’Malley (D) now has concerns that his predecessor, Gov.
Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr. (R), might have exaggerated the economic hardship facing doctors when he called the General Assembly into emergency session in 2004 to fix what he called a malpractice “crisis.” In the midst of a downward economic cycle for the insurers, a “crisis” was fabricated in order to ram “reform” through the statehouse.
Sounds oddly familiar. Unfortunately for Texans, it won’t be so easy to repair the damage done to our rights. Getting legislators on board to repeal subsidies to insurance companies is a no-brainer; getting them on board to restore patients’ rights at the courthouse is another matter entirely.
Tags: doctors, insurance, texas
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