Medical Malpractice And Tort Reform

Do a Google search on medical malpractice and an assortment of information populates. Anything from advertisements for lawyers, articles on recent cases, to potential damages a person is entitled to, resulting from medical neglect. This melting pot of information would indicate the science of medical malpractice is far reaching, difficult to understand, and requires health care facilities, and insures to maintain constant understanding of the federal and state laws.

A second issue is malpractice. Malpractice issues are always present in an unstable environment where patients will seek to remedy an incident if they feel they have been harmed (Hamric, 2009). It is important to always act in a reasonable way as a health care clinician but unfortunately there are always those who are negligent in their actions as practitioners.

Across the country, there are calls for medical malpractice tort reform based on the perception of frivolous lawsuits by patients with patients without valid claims and less-than-scrupulous lawyers are willing to prosecute them. On the one hand, the fact that some plaintiffs have received enormous settlements as a result of their medical malpractice lawsuits further fuels the debate that tort reform is needed to avoid these types of settlements that are incongruent with the facts. On the other hand, though, few observers would likely argue that some type of medical malpractice protections are required in order to protect patients from truly substandard and dangerous medical care practices and to compensate them for their injuries when these eventualities occur. One state that has implemented reasonable malpractice statutes and procedures that avoid these two extremes is Ohio where legislators passed tort reform laws in 2002. By contrast, many of the State of Michigan's laws on medical malpractice date back 40 years. This paper provides a description of the provisions of the medical malpractice statutes and procedures from these two states, followed by a summary of the research and important findings in the conclusion.

One of the great privileges of living in America is the ability to seek the American dream. We have the opportunity, if we work hard enough, to seek any career path of our choice. Those who seek out a career in healthcare should not be faced with the fear of legal action staring at them around every corner. However, there should be consequences in the event of proven neglectful medical care. Therefore, there has to be a middle ground, where both patients can receive care and healthcare professionals can practice in a safe, fearless environment.

The United States legal system exists with many favorable conditions for filing malpractice lawsuits, including low burden of proof requirements, lax limits on damage awards, and the lack of a cost-sharing provision on filing a legal action.

In order to prevent injuries that come as a result of medical malpractice, we must understand how negligence/malpractice happens in the first place – through medical errors. When we are healthy we don’t generally pursue medical attention on regular basis. Patients do not usually visit their doctor’s office until they are sick or have injury. From my experience, most times when patient’s health gets worse, sometimes it’s difficult to recognize whether it was because of the current circumstance or because of mistakes or medical error in the treatment offered.

Medical malpractice is considered to be a professional act of negligence by a health care professional or provider in which treatment provided was poor, and caused harm, injury or death to a patient. Medical malpractice is, unfortunately, becoming very common in health care all over the world, but there are precautionary measures that could help health care professionals to prevent becoming part of these statistics. “According to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), medical negligence is the third leading cause of death in the U.S.- right behind heart disease and cancer” (Cheeks, 2013). Throughout the past years there has been billions of dollars of medical malpractice payouts. With each passing year medical malpractice

Medical malpractice often results in a variety of ill-effects. In addition to the physical ramifications of questionable medical care, the financial costs can be especially steep for both the patient in question as well as society at large. The following facts illustrate

medical injuries are a result of medical malpractice, yet these mistakes are not viewed as a public

No doctor, hospital, or health care worker is perfect, and even the most highly trained, conscientious medical professional can make a mistake. However, the basis of a medical malpractice claim is not whether a mistake was made but whether the care you received lived up to the established standard for your condition. To make a claim, your malpractice attorney must demonstrate that reasonable professionals in the same field would have acted differently and deviations from that standard resulted in physical harm.

While medical errors may be unintentional, some errors result in the loss of life. The grief and emotional pain suffered by the family of a medical malpractice victim far outweighs the medical and funeral expenses the family must bear or the loss of income that can substantially impact their

In "The Effect of Medical Malpractice Liability on the Delivery of Health Care,” Daniel Weinberg discusses the effects of “ medical malpractice liability on the delivery of health care in the United States.” Weinberg approaches this topic in several different ways by breaking it down into parts. He focuses on “physician workforce, physician income and patients' access to care.” Weinberg discusses the affect medical malpractice is having on people in certain aspects of the medical field and also how it is affecting those who are seeking medical attention. One of the main topics that Weinberg talks about is how medical malpractice affects physicians and if it cause them to use defensive medicine, which goes into how some people believe that defensive medicine can be a waste of money and affect how the patients are

Typical medical malpractice actions include failure to diagnose, negligent treatment, failure to obtain implied consent and negligence during or after surgery. A hospital or medical or nursing facility may also be found liable for negligent hiring, maintaining equipment, keeping unsanitary or unsafe facilities or for lacking required or standard protocol in delivery of

Negligence, when defined, can be specified as "the failure to exercise the care that would be used by a reasonable prudent physician in the same situation" (State of New York Department of Health, 2010). Physicians that fall short to follow medical procedures or necessities while dealing with clients are thought are believed to be irresponsible and negligent irrespective of whether they were injured as a result of it or not. For a doctor to be determined as irresponsible or negligent "all that must be proven is that a physician failed to meet the standard of care" (State of New York Department of Health, 2010). Irresponsible or negligence include, but are not restricted to, the following: unlawful handling/management of a wound or disease, or any form of treatment that triggered brand-new troubles to surface, a medical diagnosis offered a little too late for its management to be efficient or if the physician started the incorrect treatment due to very little examination of the condition (ArticleBase, 2008).

B. Sonny Bal (2008) wrote, “Since the 1960s the frequency of medical malpractice claims has increased; and today, lawsuits filed by aggrieved patients alleging malpractice by a physician are relatively common in the United States. One survey of specialty arthroplasty surgeons reported that more than 70 percent of respondents had been sued at least once for medical malpractice during their career,” (Bal, 2008).