CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
Doroshow:
Obama Willing to Sell Out Patients’ Rights
23 Corporate Crime Reporter 25, June 23, 2009
President Obama is essentially willing to sell the rights of injured patients
down the river in order to get the Republicans onto his health care plan.
That’s the take of Joanne Doroshow, executive director of the Center for Justice & Democracy.
“It seems as if he’s going to take an approach that we haven’t heard often before in the traditional tort reform battles,” Doroshow told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “That would be to use clinical guidelines or so called best practice standards as some sort as a defense against a medical malpractice claim. It could be an immunity. It could be a presumption of some sort. We’re not sure how he plans to use it. But the idea would be if some medical society comes out with a standard that the doctor or hospital must meet, and that standard is complied with, then the injured patient would have no recourse, would have no opportunity to go to court against the hospital or doctor and find out whether or not negligence was involved.”
While Obama has not supported traditional reforms like caps on damages, “his instincts on litigation brought by patients or average people have never been very good,” Doroshow said.
“In 1999, the Institute for Medicine found that up to 98,000 people die in hospitals every year due to malpractice,” Doroshow said. “There has since been studies showing that that number is a lot higher. And that is just hospital injuries and deaths. There is also malpractice outside the hospital setting. Too many people are dying. And not enough is being done to improve patient care.”
“The last thing you want to do is make it more difficult for patients to hold accountable a hospital engaged in malpractice. And unfortunately, that is exactly what the President’s proposal would do – make it more difficult for people to go to court.”
“The reason people file med mal lawsuits is not so much because they need money,” Doroshow said. “It’s because they feel like they need justice. And our system of government is very much based on that concept – that you allow people the opportunity to go to court and not take matters into their own hands. I have met some victims who are so angry at the negligent care they or their children have been subjected to, that keeping them from going to court is a very dangerous thing. You don’t want to have a system where people’s rights are precluded in that way.”
Doroshow said that a single payer health care system that provides a real safety net for people “could very well reduce the number of lawsuits that we see.”
“Those who are suing because they may need compensation may have less incentive to sue under a single payer system,” Doroshow said. “But there are always going to be people who need access to the court in order to secure justice.”
“We are not thinking clearly at all about what it would mean to cut off people’s access to the courts in that way.”
[For a complete transcript of the Interview with Joanne Doroshow, see 23 Corporate Crime Reporter 25(12), June 22, 2009, print edition only.]
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