Utah Med Law

Senate Bill 79 has passed in a compromise form after hard-fought argument from legislators, rial lawyers and health care organizations.  The legislators are supposed to have the interest of the public forefront in their minds when they draft legislation.  Trial lawyers are supposed to have clients at the forefront of their minds.  Health care organizations have their constituency in mind - shareholders of public and private health care companies and doctors.

Trial lawyers who try medical malpractice cases are well paid but are only well paid if they win.  There are many cases fought that the medical malpractice lawyer never wins and is left with substantial loss.  When a medical malpractice lawyer takes on a medical malpractice case it is usually on a contingency basis.  Contingency means that the trial lawyer pays all the costs of litigation up front and only gets paid back these costs if they win the case.  The largest cost of prosecuting a medical malpractice case is the costs of expert physicians.  Often an expert physician will charge %500 per hour just to look at a case to see if the case is viable.  Doctors that serve as  experts in particularly narrow fields, such as neurosurgery or orthopedics often charge $750 to $1000 per hour for their services.  Any given expert willl cost anywhere from $5000 to $10,000 to bring a case to trial.  Sometimes cases have two, tree or more expert.  Even before teh case is considered ripe for litigation or settlement the trial attorney has already paid out of his or her own pocket thousands of dollars. If we loose the case we loose our costs. If teh medical malpractice trial lawyer wins the case we get our costs back and a one third fee.  It is very difficult and risky business to bring a medical malpractice case.

Doctors and health care institutions already make excellent incomes and the only goal of this legislation is to further line their pockets.  Greed is not their only motivation.  Confusion and the politics as usual of marshaling misleading facts persists.  If only we could sit and look at the facts we would all see that this law is bad law.  Medical malpractice insurance rates for physicians is high becasue their carriers need to make profit.  Hospitals need to make "profit" even if they are "not for profit" to satisfy their bureaucracy-building ways.

All parties are self-interested.  There needs to be an independent panel beholding to no one that makes the final decisions on matters that compromise care.

SB 79 effectively grants immunity to emergency room doctors becasue the level of evidence required approaches that of a criminal requirement called "clear & convincing."  It will be very difficult to show that an emergency room physician disregarded the interests of their patient and practiced negligently.  This evidentiary criteria will prevent medical malpractice lawyers from bringing cases against emergency room doctors and allow them to practice without scrutiny  to assure that they care for their patients without committing negligence.  This bill is lad law.

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