you know its great if you think that socialized medicine is the way to go, others disagree and i happen to be one of them. i'll give you a little fact that unfortunatly i can not back up with articles or anything you'll just have to take my word for it. there are no longer any independent OBGYN's in St. Louis county. except for memebers of the BJC system. do we really want our doctors ncorporated. can anyone else see a day when a surgeion is not allowed to opperate because there is only a 20% survival rate. i don't know about any of you but that seem out of the question to me. this is the direction it is heading unfortunatly.
i know of a Neurosurgeon who was the major Neuro in a hospital called St. Anthonies in south county. he was willing to take more high risk cases and has a higher mortality than others. right now there is only one way for him to practice he has to be self insured. want to know why, because he was willing to help and it didn't allways turn out posative. this makes him an easy victory in court. the lawyer brings up this rate of death out context and persuedes the jury that he is a bad doctor without explaining things. (now raise your hand if you think that is right)
i really don't think that it is at all right that lawers and every day people are deciding whether the doctor made the right choice. they are uneducated to the complexities of the profesion and then through our legal system they get decide if a person who has been learning for his entire adult life made the right choice.
my dad is a member of the medical exec team at said hospital and they are trying to cope with the fact that they have had 17 of their doctors leave in the past 6 months these are also only the doctors employed by the hospital, that doesn' include those in private practice. this board has been able to meet with the current Governer and both candidates on this issue and both of the demecrats were unwilling to accept the problem. all they did was say that, that was not that big of a deal and that they will be able to cope. McCaskill however has changed her views slightly and that may show some posative on the issue. obviously at least from my view things need to change and socialized medicine is not the right direction.
for a little review on the tort reform issue in Missouri please refer to this article
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/new...ctice+reform++
Quote:
JEFFERSON CITY - For the past two years, politicians have deadlocked over the rising cost of medical malpractice insurance for doctors that some claimed was driving physicians out of Missouri.
Each year the Republican-controlled Legislature sent Gov. Bob Holden measures that reduced how much money injured people could get through civil claims and limited where those claims may be filed. The theory was that limiting litigation would lower the doctors' insurance premiums.
Holden, a Democrat, vetoed both, and the Legislature failed to override the vetoes.
Now the guarantee of a new governor - either Democrat Claire McCaskill or Republican Matt Blunt - means the impasse could end.
Blunt and McCaskill offer different solutions to the problem. The biggest difference is that Blunt would extend the court protections that health care providers would enjoy to all civil lawsuits. McCaskill would not.
If elected, Blunt says he would sign legislation similar to what Holden vetoed. McCaskill wants changes that are less dramatic. The candidates' positions have prompted special interest groups to pour money into their campaign war chests.
"The vast, vast majority of physicians are lining up behind Blunt," said Tom Holloway, a lobbyist for the Missouri State Medical Association. "Frankly, she's giving the same sort of generic message that they heard from Bob Holden for two years: 'I want to help, but there is no specific commitment.' And when the alternative is what Matt Blunt is telling them, it becomes black and white for them."
Maybe so. But it isn't black and white for the Missouri Association of Trial Attorneys, the group of plaintiffs' lawyers who represent injured people in court. While the trial lawyers support McCaskill, she has put them on notice that they're not going to get everything they want.
Ken Vuylsteke, a lawyer and association board member, met with McCaskill in his St. Louis law office a few days after she won the August primary.
"She said her number one priority was to find a solution to the medical malpractice insurance problems that physicians were facing," Vuylsteke said. "If that meant she had to push things the trial lawyers didn't like, that was too bad."
Dr. George Hruza, a St. Louis dermatologist who often performs skin surgeries to combat cancer, has contributed the maximum $1,200 to Blunt's campaign. Hruza said he has many reasons for supporting Blunt, one of which was his position on the medical malpractice issue. Hruza said his malpractice insurance premiums have increased by 120 percent over what they were two years ago.
"We stopped offering some services that we had provided before in order to reduce that increase," Hruza said. "My opinion is it's getting worse. We need some help so the whole system does not collapse."
Doctors want these changes in the civil courts system:
Lower limits on amounts paid to injured people for pain and suffering.
Prohibitions on lawyers "shopping" for jurisdictions where juries may be more generous.
A method that prevents frivolous claims from coming to court.
Blunt and McCaskill would implement these changes in different ways. Blunt supports lowering the pain and suffering cap to $400,000 from the current level of $565,000. The legislation also would have removed an annual cost-of-living adjustment.
McCaskill said the current pain and suffering cap is "slightly too high." She would support lowering it, but keeping some inflation factor.
"I don't think we can set it at one amount and let it stay there forever," McCaskill said.
McCaskill and Blunt support legislation to fix a court decision that allows multiple awards for the same mistake. For example, under the court decision, a patient who was misdiagnosed during four visits to a doctor could get four separate awards for pain and suffering. Both candidates would eliminate that possibility.
Blunt also backs proposals to require that damage claims be filed in the court of jurisdiction where the accident occurred.
Currently, claims can be brought in the defendant's home county, where a business is based or where the defendant can be located. Critics of the current system say plaintiffs' lawyers abuse it by maneuvering suits to courts where juries will be more favorable.
McCaskill, a lawyer who has represented plaintiffs and defendants in civil cases, doesn't see a problem with the current system.
The problem McCaskill sees is that some lawyer abuse the system by bringing in people as defendants who have no legitimate role in the court case to gain advantage. "We have to provide more aggressive sanctions against those abusive tactics," she said.
Both candidates support a filtering mechanism to keep lawsuits without merit from going to court. It would mean a plaintiff would have to get a sworn statement from a medical specialist in the area of medicine in which an injury occurred. Before a claim could go forward in court, that specialist would have to say the claim has potential merit.
The biggest difference between McCaskill and Blunt is that Blunt wants the changes to apply to all civil lawsuits. Thus, the damage cap limits and venue restrictions would apply to those involved in an auto accident as it would to a mishap in an operating room.
"It wouldn't be fair to say we have a bad tort system that we are going to fix for one segment of the population and force everyone else to continue under a judicial system that we admit is flawed," Blunt said.
McCaskill wants the limits on pain and suffering damage payments and the affidavit of merit to only apply to medical malpractice cases. Sanctions against lawyers for abusive tactics would apply across the board.
And that's why Vuylsteke contributed $1,200 to McCaskill's campaign.
"She said it's her number one priority to find a solution for the medical community but she's not going to sacrifice the rights of the people of the state of Missouri for insurance companies and the corporate defendants," Vuylsteke said. "She will lean on them and not do like Matt Blunt to cut rights across the board to help corporations and insurance companies."
State Insurance Department statistics undermine the claims that litigation is driving up the cost of medical malpractice insurance. The department has reported that claims against doctors fell 14 percent to 625 in 2003 compared with 726 the year before.
The agency also said medical malpractice benefits to injured victims dropped dramatically while insurance companies collected more money. The department also reported that the payment of the maximum for pain and suffering damages fell to six in 2003 from 13 in 2002.
Which leads people like Sue Stratman to say that both McCaskill and Blunt are missing the point. Stratman believes it's the insurance industry - not the civil justice system - that needs a fix.
Stratman's 11-year-old son was brain damaged, blinded and crippled because of an anesthesia error in a hospital where he went for a routine hernia operation. Stratman's son will never recover.
"I would like to see insurance reform, and I would like to see doctors accountable for their mistakes," Stratman said. "It just seems to me they don't want to fix the real problem. I believe the insurance companies are losing money on investments and they pass the losses along to the doctors and blame it on the lawsuits."
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