Medical malpractice & torts

There is a great article in today's New York Times on medical malpractice costs and the research related to them. Please read the story right away as it is directly relevant to what we have been talking about in class and our other reading assignments.

The direct costs of malpractice lawsuits — jury awards, settlements and the like — are such a minuscule part of health spending that they barely merit discussion, economists say. But that doesn’t mean the malpractice system is working.

The fear of lawsuits among doctors does seem to lead to a noticeable amount of wasteful treatment. Amitabh Chandra — a Harvard economist whose research is cited by both the American Medical Association and the trial lawyers’ association — says $60 billion a year, or about 3 percent of overall medical spending, is a reasonable upper-end estimate. If a new policy could eliminate close to that much waste without causing other problems, it would be a no-brainer.

At the same time, though, the current system appears to treat actual malpractice too lightly. Trials may get a lot of attention, but they are the exception. Far more common are errors that never lead to any action.

After reviewing thousands of patient records, medical researchers have estimated that only 2 to 3 percent of cases of medical negligence lead to a malpractice claim. For every notorious error — the teenager who died in North Carolina after being given the wrong blood type, the 39-year-old Massachusetts mother killed by a chemotherapy overdose, the newborn twins (children of the actor Dennis Quaid) given too much blood thinner — there are dozens more. You never hear about these other cases.

As they say, read the rest.

Rule 11 motion

An important event in A Civil Action is the rule 11 motion filed by the defendants - something we'll be talking about next week. We talked last week about frivolous lawsuits and what mechanisms were already in place to sort many of them out. Anyway, here's an example of Rule 11 in action against a "birther" who has filed multiple lawsuits alleging that President Obama was not born in the US. The link is to a Federal Judge's order, based on Rule 11, fining her $10,000 for continuing to press her claim despite having been ordered to desist.

Stevens to retire?

Rumors abound that Justice Stevens may be planning to retire at the end of the new Supreme Court term. The gist of this rumor is that since Stevens has only hired one clerk for the 2010-11 term, and he would normally have hired all four clerks by now, that he must be planning to step down. Retired justices are allowed to hire one clerk. This all makes perfect sense, but when I googled "Justice Stevens retirement" I got pages of news stories and blog posts predicting his retirement going back at least as far as 2006, so I'd not read too much into the most current rumors. That said, many people predicted Justice Souter's retirement based on his not hiring clerks for this SC term.