Comments about ‘Malpractice lawyers flay emergency room bill’

This whole concept is very simple. It boils down to how much care are we willing to pay for. We have some people who go to the emergency room because they sneezed and others try to treat a heart attack at home. These situations leave the medical professionals caught in the middle.

If every emergency room doctors always meets the national standard of care, i.e., to simply do what a reasonable emergency room doctor would do in the same circumstance, then why would they need this bill?

It's obviously to protect the few incompetent or careless.

And if local doctors will not blow the whistle on their golfing buddies by testifying that their fellow doctors' care is substandard, then you need doctors from outside the state to come in and tell the truth.

This bill is obviously designed to punish those out of state doctors who dare to come into Utah and tell the truth by threateneing to take away their license.

Honest doctors from other states who believe in weeding out the bad doctors in Utah by exposing them will not risk their own licenses by testifying in Utah anymore for fear they will then be retaliated against by the Utah doctors protecting incompetent local doctors.

If you ever need to use the emergency room, and you want to know that all of the doctors will be competent, then call your legislators and tell them to keep you and your family safe by voting against this bill.

I like that term and it describes very well the kind of medical care now performed. The other problem with health care is the lack of communication between doctors, hospitals and patients. Services are performed without the consent of patients and what these services included and do to them or why the service is needed. Then after a service is performed they a left in the dark as to an explanation of results. Patients are treated as one of the herd and not individuals with any rights once they are in a hospital, and this is under current methods of health care. I do know that doctors and nurses get overworked because investors and profit are more important than patients. The current system of profit over health care and law suits has been created by the system of negligence they operate by. So now health care is defensive health care trying to avoid law suits for neglegence and inept staff. And it is true in every profession, legal, medical, law enforcement, etc, that incompetence is not self regulating. Those in the profession know who they are but sit in silence to protect buddies and are the real criminals.

These lawyers want to ensure that they can continue to sue doctors every time a patient does not like a result, which lines the lawyers pockets with cash that we all end up paying. It is time that we all stop paying for such lawsuits and start protecting doctors who are just trying to do a good job. If doctors will not take the job because of the inevitable lawsuits, then this is a pretty good indication that the economics demand either that we just not have emergency rooms or that we provide some more protection. I vote for keeping emergency rooms.

To More Obvious (at 7:07 am):
You have no facts to support your assumptions and arguments because there are no facts. This is part of the big insurance companies' and big hospitals' efforts to cover up incompetence with unsupported assertions that enable them to avoid being responsible for mistakes that kill people and hurt many families every day. The real crisis is that we let corrupt corporations control the care of our families.

I think it would have been better had the author of the article actually given us a better idea of how the bill would do what it was designed to do, rather than what the ambulance chasers said it was going to do. There is not enough information in the article to tell what could or could not happen. Perhaps some poster can give us a better synopsis of the bill, please??

This outcry is simply an attempt by Mr. "One Call, That's All" to continue to make life easy and profitable for him and his ilk.

Often these out of state doctor experts do nothing but testify for ambulance chasing lawyers. They do not see patients and many of them could not make a living doing anything else. These so-called experts will say almost anything to keep the paycheck rolling. This is what the bill is trying to limit.

What the lawyers left out was the fact that many of the redundant tests that are performed are done to protect the Doctors from malpractice.

I like this, even if it doesn't pass, it is call to the lawyers that somebody is watching them and knows that much of the cost of healthcare goes to the lawyers.

Lawyers can argue anything anytime. Extra tests = Extra cost. Physicians do extra testing usually to protect themselves from individuals that view any mistake in medicine as a lottery ticket. Lawyers are a plague that only the USA has to deal with. No other country has nearly the ratio of lawyers to the population. And, lawyers do not create better medicine by "protecting" patients through lawsuits but often take medical decision making out of your doctor's hands and puts it in case law. I think they call that practice medicine without a degree. There must be a way to stop the millions of dollars wasted each year in time, paper, personnel, and additional testing that is created by the nuisance suits each year in this state. If there is better idea out there we are all ears.

What a terribly researched article. I've read the bill and it has almost nothing to do with the issues brought up by those quoted. The malpractice attorneys are especially suspect here as the bill might cut into their lucrative practices. The bill would NOT give any authority to the Utah Medical Association at all. They are not even mentioned in the bill!

I can see that the bill would cut down on the number of claims that are based on evidence that is less than clear or convincing that malpractice even occurred, but I happen to think this is a good thing.

The bit about in-state docs being shielded from outside scrutiny is the biggest smokescreen of them all. The bill applies to both sides of a malpractice dispute, requiring that all expert witnesses "stick to the science" rather than testifying to whatever the laywers pay them to say. If they don't give real science-based testimony, they could be subject to discipline by the state licensing board. This seems like a good thing to me also.

Of course, I seem to like almost anything the lawyers hate.

Since these lawyers are so all-knowing about medical treatment, then let's give them white coats and stethoscopes and put them to work saving lives.

In reality, they are clever hypocrites (not to be confuses with Hippocrates) motivated only to line their own pockets, by exploiting the imperfect science and art of medicine by harassing those who actually dare to risk practicing medicine.

Pass the bill, and let the ambulance chasers get rich somewhere else.

If the lawyers dislike some pending legislation, then it must be a benefit to the consumers.

Lawyers fight tooth-and-nail when it comes to tort reform. No person is perfect. We all make mistakes. Lawyers just like to have the ability to sue when a mistake is made.

"Lawyers for Good Medical Care in Utah"... What an oxymoron! This group is opposing sensible, economical and health-promoting legislation. Let's call the group what it really is, "Lawyers out for themselves to the detriment of Utah".

I despise how these attorneys lobby by personalizing every illness to make their points. And it is amazing how short-sighted they are. Their frivolous lawsuits have increased health care costs and now Obama wants to nationalize the entire industry. Don't these attorneys see that what they are doing will bring about the thing they most want to avoid? If health care is nationalized they won't be able to sue even the legitimate cases to stop practices that should be halted.

Many of the comments aimed at lawyers are misplaced. There are very few payments made to patients injured by medical malpractice in Utah. Every payment made on behalf of a doctor for medical malpractice is required by federal law to be reported to the National Practitioner Data Bank. In 2007 there were only 67 payments made in Utah. That equates to only 10.5 payments for every 1,000 practicing doctors in the state! These facts show that medical malpractice cases are difficult to successfully pursue. Don't buy into the notion that there is a big problem here.

When physicians practice poorly their colleagues will not protect them, they know them best, and want to protect patients from sub-standard care, heck they have to fix them if their colleagues don't. Awards from a settlement won't make patients any better. It is irrational to bring in outside physicians, especially those who make a living testifying as expert witnesses.
Pass the bill!