The Health Care Bill has passed...

[AOII Angel]

Originally Posted by Kevin

What I definitely don't think should happen is that bad doctors get insulated from practicing bad medicine.

I'll agree with you here. Unfortunately, the bad doctors aren't always the ones getting sued. I know some scary cases that would make your hair curl, and I doubt anyone would sue the physician involved. There are many factors into why people sue, and it's rarely the actual malpractice involved. The doctor must have amazing bedside manner (I can't imagine because his interpersonal skills seem non-existent) because nothing seems to stop his parade of poor care. I think what we do need is a set of standards that we are required to follow, but it will never pass until the older generation of doctors stop practicing medicine and the old paternalistic standard is completely abolished. It would also be nice to have more educated people evaluating these cases since determining what meets standard of care is not exactly at the level of the lay public. Otherwise, I am on board with a lot of what you say, Kevin, I am often sickened when blatant malpractice is ignored and physicians continue to practice the same bad medicine over and over again.

But I don't see any way around that short of some sort of medical tribunal actually putting out standards for that sort of care. While that, absent a statute, probably wouldn't bind a court, part of what goes into winning a medical malpractice case is proving by a preponderance of the evidence (or more depending on the state) that the physician violated the standard of care. If all physicians had some sort of guidelines as to what would and wouldn't violate that standard, maybe they could get away from defensive medicine. I'm not an expert in that field, but something like that would probably have some serious pull if physicians would actually stick to those rules more-less.

This is what is wrong with medicine in a lot of ways now days. Medicine is NOT an exact science. When patients come to the ER complaining of cough, fatigue and chills, the ER doctor SHOULD think viral infection, NOT Cancer. Yes, the patient could have lymphoma or leukemia, but these are called Zebra diagnoses. We are not supposed to be chasing after zebras when horses are so much more common. When the patient comes back with the same symptoms a month later, THEN you do the work-up for Cancer. The doctor didn't MISS the diagnosis of cancer. It isn't MALPRACTICE. If we take every single patient with vague symptoms and do multi-million dollar work-ups, we will NEVER decrease the cost of health care in this nation.