Doctors off the hook for Medical Errors in Wisconsin? Will Scott Walker let it happen?

Why is it so many Republican politicians were once the most ruthlessly stupid doctors once? 

Joining the moronic ranks of doctor politicians everywhere is state Assembly by Rep. Erik Severson, R-Star Prairie. He and lead sponsor of the legislation Republican Sen. Leah Vukmir, a nurse practitioner and national ALEC treasurer, managed to send to Gov. Walker a billthat:

“…bars statements expressing apology or condolence made by doctors or other health care providers from being admissible in lawsuits.”

Oh if it were only that simple. Instead, if you just pick out the relevant language and intent of this law in bold type here:

The bill reads: “a statement or conduct of a health care provider that expresses apology, benevolence, compassion, condolence, fault, liability, remorse, responsibility, or sympathy to a patient or patient’s relative or representative” would not be “admissible into evidence or subject to discovery in any civil action or administrative hearing regarding the health care provider as evidence of liability or as an admission.”

The bill just took medical mistakes, errors and negligence off the table for the victims of malpractice. Incredible but true.

“Anybody in the medical field would be out from under an admission of guilt,” Sen. Dave Hansen, D-Green Bay, said. “It would make the vulnerable more vulnerable.”

Democrats as well as Sen. Glenn Grothman, R-West Bend, that the legislation went too far and could shield negligent health care providers.

Taking this down-the-rabbit-hole thinking to the next lowest level, Vukmir added this nonsensical thought to mix:

Vukmir said limiting the legislation to mirror “sympathy-only bills” in other states could force providers to censor themselves when speaking with grieving families.

And the problem with that is…?

Come Back Doctors, the State will once again help you pay for Your Medical Errors!

Free market my ***. It’s tiring to continue to play this foolish game of lies with Republican ideologues. 

Walker made the $233.7 million payment (money illegally transferred out by Gov. Doyle), and that includes interest.

There is nothing free market about the state collecting doctor fees to pay for expensive malpractice damages, so those same physicians get a price break from insurers. That’s picking winners and losers isn't it? It also allows the insurance industry to continue to gouge doctors instead of everyone dealing with the problem of patient injury or deaths.

But the bigger line of pure BS flows like a broken sewer pipe:

WRN: The Injured Patients and Families Compensation Fund is “delightfully secure again,” so says Wisconsin Medical Society Senior Vice President Tim Bartholow, MD. 

But it was the “UNCERTAINTY” that caused what...? An unprovable lie about scaring doctors away?

Bartholow says the uncertainty of the fund had an indirect effect on doctors’ confidence and likelihood of practicing medicine in our state. “There are physicians I know that made decisions to not come to this state. It was harder for us to recruit … because there was this contention over the fund.”

Talk about the far right wing beating a meaningless talking point to death; the "uncertainty" factor. Enough already. Hey Bartholow, take your problem up with malpractice insurers….

Maine Doctors turn down tort reform!! Republican author says, “It was like a slap in the face.”

Think about it; in a free market, would the government regulate malpractice payouts? Would it regulate who can sue and who can’t? Would the government step in and protect business from consumer accountability?

Of course not, but that’s just what the Republican Party has packaged and sold as “deregulate free enterprise.” But are times changing?

NY Times: With Republicans in complete control of Maine’s state government for the first time since 1962, State Senator Lois A. Snowe-Mello offered a bill in February to limit doctors’ liability that she was sure the powerful doctors’ lobby would cheer. Instead, it asked her to shelve the measure.

“It was like a slap in the face,” said Ms. Snowe-Mello, who describes herself as a conservative Republican. “The doctors in this state are increasingly going left.”

But doctors are changing. They are abandoning their own practices and taking salaried jobs in hospitals, as more doctors move from business owner to shift worker, their historic alliance with the Republican Party is weakening … Indeed, after opposing almost every major health overhaul proposal for nearly a century, the American Medical Association supported President Obama’s legislation last year because the new law would provide health insurance to the vast majority of the nation’s uninsured, improve competition and choice in insurance, and promote prevention and wellness, the group said. The Maine doctors’ group once opposed health insurance mandates because they increase costs to employers, but it now supports them, despite Republican opposition, because they help patients.

Helping patients? Those damn health insurance mandates are ending up saving lives. It's like a slap in the face. 

Walker, GOP Tort Reform Passed Earlier this Year Protects Bad Doctors. Now that's what I call the free market!

Hate government? Like deregulation?

Deregulation is really regulation, written in a way that protects one group from another. Like tort reform.

Companies and services are now protected from consumers. In a free market, that wall wouldn't exist. Malpractice limits wouldn't exist. The market would decide.

Big Republican government, in the following story, proves my case against the recent Walker "open for business" tort law. Fox6:

Medical Malpractice still…not a factor.

When will we ask Republicans to stop the lying?

Reaching back into the year 2004, I found this video clip documenting the outrageous and unjustified malpractice insurance rates doctors were seeing year after year, and for no good reason.

Rates doubled for many OB-GYN’s, not for huge malpractice payouts and court costs, but for bad Wall Street investments. Huh? Who would have guessed? And things weren’t as bad in 2004 as they are now after the 2008 crash. So, are rates going sky high because of reform or investment losses, again?



The new research below never answered the investment question in the clip above. The reason I brought it up was to show instead how other important factors are now disproving the conservative myth.

Costs associated with medical malpractice added about $55.6 billion to the nation's total healthcare costs in 2008 -- roughly 2.4% of a more than $2.3-trillion tab --
and most of that money went to pay for tests, procedures, and treatments associated with defensive medicine, according to an analysis by Harvard researchers.

The estimate by a research team at Harvard Medical School is considerably less than "some imaginative estimates put forth in the health reform debate, and it represents a small fraction of total healthcare spending. Yet in absolute dollars, the amount is not trivial," they wrote.

The analysis was in the September issue of Health Affairs as part of a package of articles aimed at exploring "Physicians' Misperception of Malpractice Lawsuits."

A second paper by J. William Thomas, PhD, of the Cutler Institute for Health and Social Policy analyzed the costs of defensive medicine across 35 medical specialties and concluded that "defensive medicine practices exist and are widespread, but their impact on medical costs is small."

So small, they wrote, that tort reform changes that would reduce medical malpractice premiums by 10% would only reduce the nation's total medical costs by 0.120% to 0.134%.

Taken together, the papers suggest that promoting tort reform as a means to control healthcare costs is a straw man, and their conclusions run contrary to the figures cited by supporters of tort reform. For example, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), in an opinion column posted on Politico in the height of this year's healthcare reform debate, wrote, "Defensive medicine -- when doctors order unnecessary and usually expensive tests and procedures in order to avoid lawsuits -- is a major contributor to skyrocketing healthcare costs. As much as $210 billion is spent on defensive medicine annually -- equal to $700 for every U.S. man, woman and child. This helps drive up insurance premiums that are already too high for many Americans."

Although they didn't find much benefit in tort reforms that put caps on noneconomic damages, (they) did conclude that collateral source offsets-- which prohibit malpractice awards from covering expenses already covered by health insurance -- appear to work, and, in this case, the new healthcare reform law, known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA), may be helpful to tort reform advocates.

The ACA will eventually require all individuals to obtain health insurance,
and in states that have already adopted collateral source offsets "greater prevalence of insurance will mean more frequent offsets, lower total indemnity payments, and less 'double payment' of medical expenses," they wrote.