Arizona readers of the New York Times might have noticed an article about an attempt in the U.S. House to do the bidding of physicians and their insurance companies. The House passed a bill with a provision tucked quietly into it that would protect doctors from being held to a standard of care used in Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.
Medical malpractice isn’t about innocent mistakes. It’s about negligence.
When you go to a Phoenix surgeon for a follow-up visit after knee surgery and the doctor asks to see your left knee rather than the right knee that was operated on, that’s a mistake.
Sometimes when a Phoenix TV station airs a story about a medical malpractice case settlement, some viewers react as if the plaintiff just won the lottery. The reality is that if the person who filed the lawsuit alleging hospital or doctor negligence receives significant compensation, it is only because they have suffered significant damage.
We have all seen stories from Phoenix news outlets of wrong-site surgeries in which doctors amputate the patient’s left leg instead of the right, or remove a healthy kidney instead of the diseased one. We have also heard of surgeons leaving scalpels, retractors and other items inside patients who have undergone surgeries.
We recently read an article in a hospital industry publication that contained some interesting numbers about orthopedic surgeons and neurosurgeons. The facts in the piece were apparently culled from a RAND report released in 2013 on the U.S. medical malpractice system.
