Reply #66: very informative but... [View All]

[NNguyenMD]

I resent your accusation that my lecturer was a "repuke". The gentlemen is an attorney and a bioethicist, and has spent the greater part of the last decade training medical students in handling issues such as confidentiality, patient autonomy, duty to treat, physician accountability, and being a patient's advocate. Maybe I should have been more clear on what he said, but I don't think that its so outrageous a thought to think that legal costs to defend physicians each year contributes to higher malpractice premiums.

The basic conclusions I came to, if you've been reading what I've been writing were basically these points

1) Lengthy statue of limitations results in defensive medical practice. More costly labs, xrays, and expensive tests. Is that neccesarily bad? Maybe not, does it cost more, it absolutely does.

2) You cannot demand perfection from physicians. We are not perfect, and every misdiagnoses or wrong choice we make resulting in a bad outcome does not negate years of experience or immediately deem us permanently incompetent. I challenge you to take a peak into what it takes to become a physician, it is a continuously changing profession that demands continuous education and adaptation. Most specialties require recertification examinations every few years, and even physicians who have practiced for decades have to go back to thousands of pages of updated material to pass them. The point is we try the best we can to provide the best treatment thats availiable based on the most current evidence that supports it.

3) I agree that physicians should be held more accountable for their actions, patients should be more informed about the history of a physician's legal bouts, and perhaps a mal-practice insurance rate modeled after the auto insurance industry's is in order. But if physicians want to make it difficult for people to yank their lisences then I hope you understand why that is. If you had invested thousands of dollars in tuition costs, and years upon years of education and training, then I'm sure you can understand why physicians would get edgy when it comes to lisence suspension. They are protective of their profession just as professors, lawyers, teachers, and unions are of their own. They have invested a lot to be where they are, their lisences are their livelihoods. We are human guys. And we don't believe that bad outcomes necessarily make it your fault, and mean that you're a bad doctor.

4) Regulation of malpratice insurance premiums is in order. Proposition 103 in California demanded that malpractice insurance companies justify rate hikes to the state insurance commisioners under very strict guidelines, and rates since then have increased along side the national rate of inflation. So it seems that what California did looks like a viable solution to a national problem.

STOP ACCUSING ME OF BEING A REPUKE!!! For the most part, people have been coming on here for a genuine discussion, but there have been a lot of knee jerk, reactionary accusations that my instructors and school is full of RNC thugs has disheartened me about DU, and bears semblance to the kind of hate you'd find at places like "Freerepublic.com". I'm not here to tout a party line, but to talk about an important issue with anyone here interested. Maybe my post # is too low for you guys to trust me. But I'm not here to spew the republican party line, and attacking one another like this is a real turn off for newcomers to DU like myself.