Howard Smith is an obstetrics-gynecology physician.
When you are sued for medical malpractice, your malpractice carrier establishes your duties to it, and your lawyer establishes your duties to him or her. Let me be clear – when you are sued for medical malpractice, you have no greater duty than to yourself. A duty is a commitment or an expectation on you to perform properly in accordance with certain circumstances. A duty may arise from a system …
I am an OB/GYN and no stranger to malpractice litigation. As beleaguered as you may feel when you are sued for medical malpractice, the next hurdle to conquer after you are served is when you realize that your own attorney is prepared to throw you under the bus.
You do not deserve this. Whether a complication is an error of nature or a medical error, a complication always precedes a lawsuit. …
There has always been a “fight club” because there have always been medical malpractice lawsuits. They are predicated on complications, either errors of nature or medical errors, and no doctor is immune. In the United States, roughly 85,000 medical malpractice lawsuits are filed per year, and there are 1 million doctors. For any doctor, the background risk for a medical malpractice lawsuit is 8.5% per year.
Are these statistics acceptable to …
There is no shortage of the problems that plague health care. Even so, health law gurus make problems worse by creating the medical liability litigation industry. Gurus deny creating this industry. They create health reforms and tort reforms to solve problems. That explains the Affordable Care Act, 100 tort reforms, the medical liability litigation industry, and difficulties.
Have you …
In line with my previous posts that explain how to resolve all medical malpractice lawsuits, especially frivolous ones, at the lowest possible cost for the physician and the malpractice carrier, this article addresses a malicious medical malpractice lawsuit. Malicious lawsuits deserve something more. Not only are they all frivolous, but they should exact a cost from those who seek to profit from them.
The forewarning
On June 19, 2018, a patient …
Attention all doctors: You can be dismissed from a medical malpractice lawsuit and, at the same time, save 30% on the cost of your medical malpractice premiums per year.
Just as no physician is immune from a complication, none are immune from a resulting malpractice lawsuit. As of now, you stand a 5% chance each year of a medical malpractice lawsuit that has a 70% chance of being frivolous. A 70% …
A recurring theme expressed by many contributors and commentators to KevinMD is physician burnout.
It is generally accepted that chaos causes burnout. There is no shortage of chaos in the practice of medicine: emotional, physical, personal, professional, and political stresses, not to mention the threat of lawsuits and the cost of liability insurance. This is just the shortlist. There is also no shortage of adjustments that doctors make in response.
It is …
Readers familiar with my earlier posts understand that I believe nothing causes physician burnout more than the threat of a lawsuit. The risk for any doctor is 5% per year; hence, a malpractice suit is inevitable for every 20 years in practice. The common denominator is a complication from which no doctor has immunity.
Those who deny ever being sued are either not practicing long enough or the complication has little …
Lawyers assert that they never file a frivolous lawsuit. All malpractice claims are legitimate because there is a reasonable suspicion of fault when a case is filed.
On January 21, 2022, at 11:40 a.m., I received a call from my attorney, who represented me in a frivolous malpractice lawsuit, informing me that I was unconditionally dismissed. I never doubted that dismissal with prejudice was inevitable.
For a lawyer, a …
In a medical malpractice lawsuit, your defense is completely in the hands of the malpractice carrier, and, make no mistake of it, its interests come first. However, the medical malpractice insurance contract is more instrumental in the defense of a doctor than insurance companies realize. There are clauses in the contract that, at first glance, seem to benefit carriers. However, there is a flip side to each clause.
First Read more…
The prevailing party contract is not the only contract that can protect a doctor in medical malpractice litigation. There is also the doctor-defense counsel contract.
Because of the risk of litigation, doctors often have a contract with a medical malpractice insurance carrier. The carrier offers to cover litigation costs in exchange for premiums, limits on liability, and other terms of coverage. The insurance company is then obligated to appoint and pay …
There are 50,000 medical malpractice lawsuits filed per year. Each doctor has a 5 percent chance of being sued each year, and every doctor will be sued at least once in 20 years. 70 percent of medical malpractice lawsuits are non-meritorious and are dropped. These represent 35,000 frivolous lawsuits. Until now, there is no way to prevent a frivolous medical malpractice lawsuit.
America is a litigious society. The medical liability …
Lawsuits are conventional in medical practice.
An unhappy patient hires a malpractice attorney, who hires a medical expert, who interprets the standards of care and generalizes a departure from the standards of care and proximate cause. The preponderance of evidence is 50% certainty plus an ill-defined scintilla, which needs to be only 0.01% to be good enough.
The lawyer sues the doctor, who notifies the malpractice carrier, hires a defense counsel, and …
Unfortunate outcomes are inevitable even when practicing quality medicine. Most are random events, but some are medical errors. The majority of physicians have been sued and those, who have not, will be. Common to all defendants is that the lawsuit is totally fallacious.
To be fallacious, the outcome of a medical intervention must be an unpreventable random mal-occurrence. This is the only alternative to a medical error. Nevertheless, there is a …
Most physicians have been defendants in lawsuits. Plaintiff experts almost always have a feeding frenzy. In truth, expert witnesses are held to codes of conduct about remaining objective and avoiding partisanship or advocacy. Yet, should the verdict favor defendants, these experts, except for deserving the term “hired guns,” are rarely, if ever, held accountable for their feeding frenzy, which conflicts with their ethical obligations.
I want to share my experience. I independently …
Before COVID-19, the health care system was plagued by another epidemic: malpractice lawsuits. Much is expected of doctors, and disappointments have consequences. Lawsuits are too often a consequence. Under normal conditions, there are 46,000 malpractice claims per year. One-hundred percent begin with the allegation of medical negligence. Seventy-three percent end deciding there is none. In these 33,800 cases are no indemnity payments, but there are $767 million in defense costs.
Now …
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