Texas Medical Dream Team Invite No. 5, Team Nightmare
Attorney
(866) 735-1102 Ext 335
I was thinking maybe I should leave the Great State of Texas alone and let them learn from their mistakes. But I can’t leave this subject alone because it seems wrong for professionals that make hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in income to ask patients to take financial responsibility for their professional mistakes. That’s exactly what doctors have done with what they call tort reform.
Patients or those who may be a patient need to think about what tort reform does. The patient is being forced to take on insuring financial risks while guessing what risks they may experience from the doctors, the surgical team, the hospital staff, the drugs being given, possible harm posed by injections and the equipment they come into contact with while hospitalized. Let one component fail to act just as it needs to and the patient’s quality of life is put at risk. If there is a simple analogy it’s Russian roulette.
What tort reform does is make it so if something goes wrong you’re as a patient on your own. There are degrees of tort reform and not all professional activity that leads to a mistake is affected by tort reform. But the areas that are affected lead to other more serious consequences. Take changes in the rules affecting high risk areas like OB. It’s nice to be able to deliver babies without fear of having to pay for the incredible life of financial and emotional hardship parents of brain damaged babies experience. The costs are in the millions of dollars. What tort reform does is make the claim harder to prove then limits the damages a parent or baby-patient can collect through the court system. The higher the level of proof and the less that can be awarded through the courts the higher the risk the case is going to be lost and the less economically feasible it is to pursue. Pretty soon the lawyers won’t even help you because they can’t economically justify the risks involved. It’s a risk-reward analysis that leaves the patient alone to insure their own damages from medical mistakes.
Maybe many of you will think fewer lawsuits is a good thing. I suppose it could be considered good right up until that second when the mistake changes your life, in a way that you haven’t insured the risk and what you once knew to be your quality of life, suddenly and without warning is destroyed and your family is left alone to fend off the bill collectors. That’s what happened to my mother; but I’ll save that for another day. Today let’s talk about you the patient and what happens when you get the operating team called Team Nightmare.
Here is a likely scenario. You need surgery. You check in and they prep you. Great the surgeon is even smiling. Okay go ahead and put me under. And then you awaken in the recovery room and they tell you not to worry but they operated on the wrong patient or the wrong side of your body or operated on you with the wrong procedure. Or worse the surgeon has a substance abuse problem that everyone in the medical community was ignoring just hoping no one would die before he obtained treatment. What you say? You did what with my kidney? You did what to my brain? Why did this 90” operation take seven hours? Please explain how this could have happened. Well they really don’t so you go to the lawyer’s office and he or she says, sorry I can’t help you because tort reform measures took away your rights or made doctors and medical teams immune from being sued for their mistakes.
Well this is not your day because today during surgery you won the medical mistake lottery. Oh and about that quality of life you used to know. The medical team while briefly explaining what happened let’s you know with their smugness that you’re on your own. Your quality of life is now gone but the medical team keeps smiling because they are all saving a few dollars at your expense. Your quality of life is impaired, theirs is improved and this non-economic balance sheet is even. You see quality of life is what the courts refer to as a non-economic damage. Just because we remove it from the jury verdict form or limit the amount you can recover it doesn’t disappear. Quality of life issues and expenses continue to exist. Everyone has a certain cost to their quality of life. Mine may be less than yours. If I take fewer vacations than you do or drive an older car or workout at a less expensive club I can live less expensively than you can. By doing so I can save more of my disposable income, invest it and reap the benefits of added financial security in the future. Your present spending habits may give you more pleasure today but less in the future. Of course if I save and save but die early then some people would say I should have spent the disposable income and enjoyed a better quality of life in the present.
As you can see quality of life issues cost money. They are expensive. If you can no longer earn a living and need the assistance of a daily care taker you may never again in your lifetime have the financial resources to go on even one vacation. It isn’t a matter of working harder or being financially smarter; because you physically can’t produce any labor employers are willing to pay you to perform.
I can see you are getting nervous thinking about what I’m saying. Wait a second; I never intended to win the medical mistake lottery. I only wanted to save money and to not have to listen to the doctors threaten to leave the state. It wasn’t supposed to be me. I’ve got a wife and kids at home.
That’s the thing about the medical mistake lottery; you don’t know you’re even in the game until it’s too late. So how can you protect yourself? Well, first you have to appreciate the risks of being a patient in your local medical community.
Go ahead; I can see you have a question: What risks are we talking about?
Those hospital and medical risks include things like people problems, germs, infections, product defects, a surgeon’s substance abuse, under-trained and over-worked staff along with malfunctioning equipment that they use. People don’t always follow the right protocols, but no one on the medical team says a thing to anyone because to do so would be considered disloyal to the medical community.
And what about those drugs you get to take? Oh yummy, that’s a very interesting subject.
Think of all the stock prices going up and fat cats from Big Pharma making million dollar bonuses because you’re taking their pills. Double yummy!
You mean all the retirees get to stay on vacation an extra week if I take more pills? Triple yummy!
Do you know if the research into probably side effects is based on lies about the number of stroke victims and heart events?
Come on double down on the meds because it improves the quality of life for the baby boomers who aren’t stroking out.
What’s a little heart attack or two if the drugs sell well? Come on you’ve got to give a little to get a little. Be a player and take one for the team!
And so today, the invitation goes out to Team Nightmare. We hope you’ll join us on the Texas Medical Dream Team. Don’t worry any more about being financially responsible for those little professional mistakes; after all even if we operate on the wrong site God gave everyone two of most everything that is a vital organ; what, me worry? Not on your life.
From Susan Wang of the Wall Street Journal comes this tale of your next potential medical risk.
“Though the doctor’s behavior was questioned by an operating-room nurse in the morning and he had a history of drug and alcohol use, the doctor continued with a patient procedure until the afternoon. That patient suffered complications from liposuction that lasted seven hours instead of the 90 minutes he was told it would take. The doctor left the operating room without finishing the procedure; he eventually was fired and lost his medical license.”
….
“Last year, Beth Israel Deaconess disclosed that a surgeon had done a procedure on the wrong side of a patient after the operating team had failed to follow protocol. Read more here”
No way!
Way Garth!