Priorities
Very interesting articles on malpractice reform from the Dallas Morning News.
Doctors have seen their costs fall for liability insurance as malpractice insurance companies return to the state and to profitability. There is no evidence of savings to Texas consumers, however.
Whether plaintiff’s lawyers or bureaucrats are best equipped to root out bad doctors is at the heart of the debate.
Everyone is talking about how many doctors are applying for licenses in Texas now that the malpractice rates have gone down. They’re talking about extra appropriations to deal with the backlogs. Shouldn’t it be financed out of the licensing fees themselves?
Anyway, maybe we should be providing extra appropriations for the Texas Medical Board to handle it’s increased enforcement responsibilities. The article states that the board has increased the number of completed investigations which sounds impressive. But having dealt with enough government statistics in the past, I have to wonder what, if any action was taken based on those complete investigations. See, the board might find out the physician is dangerous but if it doesn’t do anything about it, what difference does it make?
And even though the number of disciplinary actions have increased, I’m not impressed. Why? Because in fiscal year 2002, the litigation section received 278 physician cases and it’s physician case load was 284. Based on those numbers, one could reasonably believe that the litigation section was able to meet it’s caseload demand. However, in fiscal year 2003 the section received 483 physician cases and guess what it’s current physician case load was that year–276. It was actually handling fewer cases although the number of cases referred to it increased by over 70%.
Since the reforms went into effect, the litigation section has gone from handling somewhere close to 100% of the cases referred to it to around 60%. I’m assuming that these cases must be pretty bad to actually move the board to take a physician to court. I guess they’ll get around to addressing their litigation backlog once they approve all those new physician licenses.
Technorati Tags: Texas , tort reform, medical malpractice, Texas Medical Board, physician licensing
Filed under: Texas Medical Board, medical malpractice, physician licensing, texas, tort reform
So when do the rest of us get to see the benefits of tort reform?…
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