The real way to save malpractice costs is to reduce malpractice itself, not limiting malpractice awards. Limits on awards simply shift the costs from those who commit malpractice to the victims because the severely injured or killed can’t get full compensation and the less injured find it uneconomical to bring a claim at all.
National Practitioner Data Bank data show that in most states only about 2 percent of physicians have been responsible for over half of all the money paid out for malpractice since 1990. Quite often these few physicians have multiple payments in their records but no action ever taken against their license or clinical privileges. If the licensing boards revoked or restricted the licenses of the repeat offenders or if the hospital peer reviewers took action to restrict or revoke their clinical privileges, we could not only save money on malpractice, we’d save lives and prevent injuries, too.
We’d save far more than limits on malpractice awards would save. There are fewer than 20,000 malpractice payments each year. Yet the Institute of Medicine says there are about 100,000 deaths a year from malpractice. Other sources double that number. And those are just deaths; injuries not resulting in death are not included in their estimates. So it is obvious that by reducing malpractice itself, we’d save much more money than we would be limiting malpractice awards. Not only that, we’d save lives and prevent injuries. We’d be treating the disease—malpractice itself—not just the symptoms — malpractice payments.
100,000 deaths annually due to malpractice seems to be a very high number, so I checked the CDC’s annual “Deaths and Mortality Rate” report. Nothing that shows directly as any indication of malpractice, although the quoted information above suggests that malpractice kills from 100,000 to 200,000 people annually. That would place malpractice at somewhere between 2nd and 6th among the causes of death in this country. At that kind of death rate we’d be talking about an epidemic trailing only heart disease and cancer; I suspect it might make some news.
OK, so I checked the Institute of Medicine’s Web site to see what their basis 100,000 number is. A quick search of their site turned up no such number, nor did it show any current/posted IOM report that covers the topic.
This leads me to question the accuracy of the letter, or wonder whether there may be a hidden agenda here.