Tort Reform
As the legislative session approaches, rumors are swirling tht the two big medical malpratice insurers in Utah are going to push numerous tort reform bills this legislative session.
It may sound funny to say this, but as a personal injury lawyer, I would love to see personal injury lawsuits come to an end.
In my opinion, the best way to do this is to create a safer world. Unfortunately, the health insurance lobby is not interested in this. They want to prevent people from suing without making any efforts to improve safety.
Harvard recently released a study showing that medical errors cause the same number of deaths as if a 747 crashed every day. That’s scary. Fortunately, most doctors are great. They are smart, nice, kind and careful. Unfortunately, we have bad doctors in our community. If their patients who are injured don’t have the right to sue, who will take care of them and their medical bills? (presumably medicaid and medicare will pick up the tab). My vote is to let bad doctors pick up the tab instead of us.
Recently two pilots lost their pilot licenses for working on their laptops and overshooting an airport. Luckily no one was hurt or killed. I can guarantee you that a bad doctor would never lose his/her license in Utah for doing something like that and causing a patient death. We have alcoholic doctors that go on practicing medicine year after year. In Utah, if a doctor gets hooked on prescription narcotics and injures a patient, it is very rare for the doctor to permanently lose his/her license.
I hope the legislature doesn’t get duped into letting the malpractice insurance companies off the hook when bad doctors mess up and hurt people. We should be running those doctors out of town, not protecting them.
