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The state should subsidize medical malpractice insurance.
The state should then change it from community model to experience model insurance. The way it stands now, the risks of a good dotor messing up are distributed in a pool that inclueds the risks of very bad doctors messing up, which causes the good doctors to have to pay more to cover the costs of the bad doctors screwing up. Instead, it would be based on experience, like car insurance currently is. A bad doctor who commits erros should have to pay a much higher premiium than the good doctor who didn't hurt anyone.
Since the state subsidizes malpractice insurance, the individual physicians are not actually paying for it themselves except through the tax system. The higher premiums they are changed when they hurt someone are then the equivalent of fines, which would be sizeable and provide enough of an incentice for them to change their wreckless ways. Further systems need to be implimentd by which the most egregious errors are also subject to criminal prosecution and jail time for the offending physician. No such mechanism that would enable that currently exists, but it would just be a matter of crunching some numbers and writing up some model legislation to be incorporated later.
This plan assures that physicians are adequately compensated for the important work that they do and the extreme lifestyle they have brought upon themselves (you know you love every minute of it), while seeing to it that malpractice is remove from the euation as far as overhead and a source of higher patient charges. Still incentives for doctors to be professional and practice medicine with due dilligence would exist in the form of fines and possible jail time for the most egregious offenders.
Medical errors would lower because you're taking the bad apples out of the fold. Malpractice wouldn't be an issue because suits would be far less likely with the rotten apples gone, and when someone does bring a suite and is successful, Malpractice pays the victim his/her due compensation, which doesn't necessarily have to be kepped, and makes the doctor pay a huge fine to the government controlled malpractice, and investigates him further for possible disiplinary charges and puts all this on a record made available to the public so consumers can use it was information in deciding to see him or not.
Since malpractice is now a goverment program funded by the progressive income tax, when frivilous lawsuites are brought agains it, it should have it's own lawyers that can stand up to the trial lawyers with a woman who chipped a nail and say "no! we're not gonna settle. You're going to have to either drop this case, or come in here to court with us and lose." The current system makes it too hard to shew away frivilous lawsuites because it's become a business and people will settle out of court based on economic decisions that are mutually beneficial to both. It has nothing to do with determining who is at fault and who isn't, which is what our courts are for.
So basically, the government supplies malpractice pseudoinsurance to physicians, funded through the progressive income tax and fines, in the form of a financial bubble that can get dipped into when a patient sues a doctor for a legitimate error on the doctor's part. Say the patient gets awarded 10,000 dollars, and the errror was not the result of bad medical practice or anything flagrant and it was petty much unforeseeable. The physician simply pays a 1000 dollar fine back to malpractice, maybe is made to take a one day suspension, a log of the incident is made in his permanet file, and then he comes back to work and continues to be the same doctor he always was.
If, on the other hand, someone comes into the ER who needs their right leg amputated and the trauma surgeon amputates their healthy left leg, that patient's lawyer would sue malpractice for 2million dollars to cover financial and economic losses and for pain and suffering. Because of the egregious nature of this error, the offending doctor would have to pay 1000000 dollars to malpractice, be sent to jail for 6 months, and then his license to practice in that state terminated or at least suspended for a specified period of time.
So to recap: The government supplies malpractice to physicians, and malpractice also has its own attorneys, supplied by the government.
When someone experiences a medical error: they use their attorney to file a suite against malpractice. Their attorney and malpractice's attornies sit down and decide if the case has merit or if it is frivilous. If it has merit, the victim gets his jury trial and however much they award comes from malpractice. There would be no way to settle out of court. The case is either frivilous and gets dropped or has merit and is sent to the jury trial. This would elliminate the possibility of insurance companies settling every case that comes along, even if it is blatantly frivilous, just because it's cheaper for them to hand the prankster a 50,000 dollar check than it is to fight him in cour. The doctor responsible for the error pays a fine to malpractice and is given some other punishment ranging from minimal suspension to total loss of licensure, and even time in prison.
This makes healthcare affordable for everyone while allowing the physicians to keeo their well deserved large salaries without having to raise patients rates in response to ever increasing malpractice premiums and raising them yet again from having to perform defensive medicine on them. All this translates into a lower price for the patient and a much more fair system for all parties involved if the patient does decide to pursue legal action.
The state should then change it from community model to experience model insurance. The way it stands now, the risks of a good dotor messing up are distributed in a pool that inclueds the risks of very bad doctors messing up, which causes the good doctors to have to pay more to cover the costs of the bad doctors screwing up. Instead, it would be based on experience, like car insurance currently is. A bad doctor who commits erros should have to pay a much higher premiium than the good doctor who didn't hurt anyone.
Since the state subsidizes malpractice insurance, the individual physicians are not actually paying for it themselves except through the tax system. The higher premiums they are changed when they hurt someone are then the equivalent of fines, which would be sizeable and provide enough of an incentice for them to change their wreckless ways. Further systems need to be implimentd by which the most egregious errors are also subject to criminal prosecution and jail time for the offending physician. No such mechanism that would enable that currently exists, but it would just be a matter of crunching some numbers and writing up some model legislation to be incorporated later.
This plan assures that physicians are adequately compensated for the important work that they do and the extreme lifestyle they have brought upon themselves (you know you love every minute of it), while seeing to it that malpractice is remove from the euation as far as overhead and a source of higher patient charges. Still incentives for doctors to be professional and practice medicine with due dilligence would exist in the form of fines and possible jail time for the most egregious offenders.
Medical errors would lower because you're taking the bad apples out of the fold. Malpractice wouldn't be an issue because suits would be far less likely with the rotten apples gone, and when someone does bring a suite and is successful, Malpractice pays the victim his/her due compensation, which doesn't necessarily have to be kepped, and makes the doctor pay a huge fine to the government controlled malpractice, and investigates him further for possible disiplinary charges and puts all this on a record made available to the public so consumers can use it was information in deciding to see him or not.
Since malpractice is now a goverment program funded by the progressive income tax, when frivilous lawsuites are brought agains it, it should have it's own lawyers that can stand up to the trial lawyers with a woman who chipped a nail and say "no! we're not gonna settle. You're going to have to either drop this case, or come in here to court with us and lose." The current system makes it too hard to shew away frivilous lawsuites because it's become a business and people will settle out of court based on economic decisions that are mutually beneficial to both. It has nothing to do with determining who is at fault and who isn't, which is what our courts are for.
So basically, the government supplies malpractice pseudoinsurance to physicians, funded through the progressive income tax and fines, in the form of a financial bubble that can get dipped into when a patient sues a doctor for a legitimate error on the doctor's part. Say the patient gets awarded 10,000 dollars, and the errror was not the result of bad medical practice or anything flagrant and it was petty much unforeseeable. The physician simply pays a 1000 dollar fine back to malpractice, maybe is made to take a one day suspension, a log of the incident is made in his permanet file, and then he comes back to work and continues to be the same doctor he always was.
If, on the other hand, someone comes into the ER who needs their right leg amputated and the trauma surgeon amputates their healthy left leg, that patient's lawyer would sue malpractice for 2million dollars to cover financial and economic losses and for pain and suffering. Because of the egregious nature of this error, the offending doctor would have to pay 1000000 dollars to malpractice, be sent to jail for 6 months, and then his license to practice in that state terminated or at least suspended for a specified period of time.
So to recap: The government supplies malpractice to physicians, and malpractice also has its own attorneys, supplied by the government.
When someone experiences a medical error: they use their attorney to file a suite against malpractice. Their attorney and malpractice's attornies sit down and decide if the case has merit or if it is frivilous. If it has merit, the victim gets his jury trial and however much they award comes from malpractice. There would be no way to settle out of court. The case is either frivilous and gets dropped or has merit and is sent to the jury trial. This would elliminate the possibility of insurance companies settling every case that comes along, even if it is blatantly frivilous, just because it's cheaper for them to hand the prankster a 50,000 dollar check than it is to fight him in cour. The doctor responsible for the error pays a fine to malpractice and is given some other punishment ranging from minimal suspension to total loss of licensure, and even time in prison.
This makes healthcare affordable for everyone while allowing the physicians to keeo their well deserved large salaries without having to raise patients rates in response to ever increasing malpractice premiums and raising them yet again from having to perform defensive medicine on them. All this translates into a lower price for the patient and a much more fair system for all parties involved if the patient does decide to pursue legal action.
