Re: Buying experience?
BTW, very few doctors get paid for tests, since they are sent out to labs who charge us or our insurance companies. But some doctors do indeed perform too much testing in order to avoid getting sued for negligence by personal injury lawyers (about the only creature on earth lower than a car salesperson).
Depends - many physicians w/ their own facilities have their own equipment (i.e. - radiation oncologists).
If someone screws up, there should be consequences. However, when doctors in the US each have to pay over $100,000 per year (on average depending on specialty) in malpractice insurance, this has caused major damage to our health care system and the greed of personal injury lawyers are the major reason for this.
Actually, over the past decade, malpractice premiums have gone up significantly while the amounts paid out in malpractice case have remained the same (and even going down some years).
The rise in malpractice premiums has everything to do w/ insurance companies making up for their investment losses than any actual rise in malpractice payouts.
Every other developed nation that I know of has severe limits on medical malpractice claims, and many don't allow them at all (can't sue the government who provides health care).
So if you are willing to support limitations on medical malpractice claims, then I may take you off the s---bag list. But then there are still those ridiculous lawsuits like when a jury awarded $2.86 million to a woman who burned herself with hot coffee she purchased from McDonald's.
Caps on malpractice payouts do little in getting rid of the "nuisance" suits (most of which are settled for less than $20-30k) and just hurt those who really have been injured by the medical profession; the medical profession needs to do a much better job of policing and getting rid of its members (2-3%) who end up causing the bulk of the serious malpractice cases.
On the other side, a ban should be placed on attorneys who continually bring frivolous cases to court.
All of the similar lawsuits against McDonald's (and others) in the UK have been dismissed by the courts. Only in the US do we have such silliness.
Even if one concedes that the coffee should not be served so hot (which I am not conceding), there is no justification for anything close to a $2.86 million judgment. There needs to be tort reform that puts limits on these types of judgments like every other nation in the world has.
Actually, if you read the minutia of what the jury took into consideration, the end result made pretty good sense (I, too, had a negative inital reaction).
1. The coffee was superheated, well above industry norms.
2. The superhot coffee (40-50 degrees higher than industry norms) caused 3rd degree burns (basically the skin melted off) in a very sensitive area.
3. The jury took into account that the person was partially at fault and reduced damages accordingly.
4. Due to the superheated coffee, there had been over 700 reports made of people being burned by McDonald's coffee, w/ McDonald's having settled a no. of burn claims.
5. The jury only awarded $200k in compensatory damages (the woman, over the course of her skin graft treatment lost over 20 lbs) - which was further reduced to $160k.
6. The widely quoted $2.6 million awarded was for
punitive damages due to McDonald's not having adequately addressed the burn issue despite hundreds of complaints - and was calculated on the basis of
2 days of McDonald's revenue from coffee sales.
7. The $2.6 million amount was reduced by the court to $480k (3x compensatory damages) and the parties settled out of court for less than $600k.
All in all, a pretty reasonable result.
8. And oh, the injured party initially offered to settle for $20k to cover medical costs; McDonald's countered w/ $800 and would not budge.
I wish I were a doctor, but alas, no. But I do pay for medical insurance and my share of medical expenses, and a good chunk of that goes for malpractice insurance.
The amount paid out in malpractice claims and premiums amount to little over
1% of the total amount spent on healthcare in the US.
The cost of expensive tests (on ever more expensive machines) and the continually escalating price and amount of pharmaceuticals are the prime reason for the double digit increase in insurance premiums; also, the healthcare industry is highly inefficient - about
one-third of all dollars spent on healthcare is spent on paperwork instead of actual medical care.
Unfortunately, most Americans know little of the actual facts as to why healthcare is so expensive in the US and only know the few misleading talking points pushed by the big medicine (HMOs, pharmaceutical companies, etc.).
People gotta make up for poor self-esteem somehow, right?
