Sometimes the Oregonian editorial board writes something in an editorial that makes me choke on my muesli in the morning, and this a.m. just happened to be one of those mornings. The editorial focused on two Washington state initiatives on next week’s ballot that deal with medical malpractice. To be fair, they did get one fact straight in the piece:

…avoidable medical errors are killing as many as 98,000 people nationwide each year, according to an Institutes of Medicine study, and hundreds of thousands more are harmed by simple mistakes in prescribing and administering drugs.

The problem is the editorial board then turns around and blames the high cost of medical malpractice insurance premiums on the patients and their families who suffer these terrible losses:

Health care access is threatened by rising medical liability costs, driven up in part by high jury awards.

Where does the Oregonian editorial board get this information? Where are the statistics from reputable, non-partisan organizations that prove this? There aren’t any. That’s why the O’s board didn’t include a reference in their editorial, as they did for the stats on how many people die or are injured due to medical negligence.

If the O’s board had done their research, they would have discovered that capping medical malpractice awards does not and has not reduced the cost of medical liability insurance, nor has it reduced health care costs overall. It would have been easy for the O’s board to find these stats through the federal government’s non-partisan General Accounting Office and the Congressional Budget Office. Both, as reported in FactCheck.org, found that malpractice awards as they relate to medical spending have no significant impact:

When CBO applied the methods used in the study of Medicare patients hospitalized for two types of heart disease to a broader set of ailments, it found no evidence that restrictions on tort liability reduce medical spending. Moreover, using a different set of data, CBO found no statistically significant difference in per capita health care spending between states with and without limits on malpractice torts.(emphasis mine)

Medical spending has skyrocketed in the last 15 to 20 years. So too have malpractice insurance rates physicians are required to pay to stay in practice, but let’s get one thing straight: It has absolutely nothing to do with high jury awards in medical malpractice cases. Rather it has more to do with insurance companies who are beholden to their shareholders on Wall Street, which is a critical fact the O’s board forgot to mention.

Hopefully, like Oregonians did last year on Measure 35, Washingtonians will vote “NO” on capping medical malpractice awards. As it stands, Oregonians won’t be facing another M35 in next year’s election. Perhaps it has something to do with Dr. Patel lurking around the state, but the Oregon Medical Association has decided to put this issue on hold for now. In the meantime, we should be addressing some of the real causes of high medical costs and opening up a serious and honest discussion with the medical community on how to appropriately deal with negligent physicians.

Oh, and don’t forget to send an e-mail to the Oregonian letting them know they got it wrong on medical malpractice compensation. Go ahead and send them the link to the FactCheck.org piece.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 31st, 2005 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Elections, Health Care. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.