The Maryland Court of Appeals changed an illogical quirk in Maryland law on Friday, finding that doctors must inform patients not only of the risks of treatment but also the potential consequences of forgoing a medical procedure.
The Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog has a complete summary of this medical malpractice case.
Two Texas nurses have been charged criminally with reporting a doctor to the Texas Medical Board.
I’ll bet you $10 the charges are dropped once the Winkler County District Attorney wakes up. (Is this an elected post?) But the chilling effect that will flow all the way to Maryland will be nurses taking the path of least resistance and allowing doctors to go unchallenged will be a legacy of this case.
The New Jersey Supreme Court has overturned both the trial court and an intermediate appeals court, reversing one of the largest medical malpractice suit verdicts in New Jersey, a whopping $75,967,140 (which the trial court had reduced to $70,891,781.59).
The facts of this case, regardless of whether medical malpractice was the cause, are far beyond awful. A four-month-old boy suffered brain damage when he was deprived of oxygen following surgery in 1998. There was no dispute that the boy suffers from significant intellectual, verbal, and neuron motor deficits and will require substantial, round-the-clock care for the rest of his life, barring some incredible new technology. The boy also sustained a hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, which is a brain injury that results in cortical blindness.
In addition to what had to be incredible sympathy for the child (any human being would), the jury also had to be put off by the emergency room doctor’s defense. The doctor first argued that the injury occurred prior to her arrival in the PICU. But that claim was rebutted by reconstruction of the timeline that largely was undercut by the discovery of the cardiac monitoring strips that were produced by the defendants’ medical malpractice lawyers (not the ER’s doc’s malpractice lawyer) two weeks into the trial. Incredible, right?
Wisconsin has a really dumb medical malpractice law. Non-dependent children or their parents are not allowed to file a medical malpractice lawsuit for a death claim that results from a medical error. There is now a move afoot in the Wisconsin legislature to make for a more fair wrongful death medical malpractice law.
In Maryland, there can be no wrongful death claim because there is no surviving parent or child. In other words, there is no loss for the death of the victim. This is one awful consequence of Maryland’s wrongful death law and should be changed. But Maryland does not go as far as Wisconsin and require dependency, which is abjectly unjust and hopefully will be changed soon.
If you have a wrongful death medical malpractice claim in Maryland, call our Maryland malpractice lawyers at 800-553-8082 or online for a free Maryland malpractice consultation.
Recently passed laws in several states, including Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., require hospitals to detail serious injuries; this reveals the frequency and variety of so-called “never events” which should never happen. The laws are different in each state. Virginia’s public records identify the hospitals by name, but Maryland and Washington, D.C.’s don’t name names.
Five years ago, a Maryland law was passed requiring Maryland hospitals to report errors that led to death and serious harm. This month, the Maryland commission that sets hospital rates is using a new system that ranks hospitals on how often they commit 52 specific mistakes, from preventable obstetrical complications to infections of wounds that develop after surgery. Maryland hospitals that report the most mistakes from that list will be required to bill insurers at a lower reimbursement rate. In other words, good hospitals will make more money.
I think most Maryland malpractice hospital lawyers support this idea. The better hospitals get more money, which motivates them to get better. I worry, though, about any hospital that is last on this list. No real motive for the hospital to get better because they are too far from the higher reimbursement. But the rich Maryland hospitals get richer while the poor hospitals get poorer with no motivation to get better.
I provided my thoughts on Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog on Friday on Public Citizen’s recent report on medical malpractice and its impact on health care costs. The short answer: not much. But Public Citizen provided one more malpractice statistic that is worth mentioning. In an hour, chances are that five to 11 Americans will die from preventable medical errors by the time you finish. Statistically, it is more likely than not that not a single malpractice payment will be made because any of these deaths that would not have occurred absent medical malpractice.
The notion that most malpractice lawsuits in Maryland are trumped up by medical malpractice lawyers is just plain false. The reality is that, relatively speaking, few meritorious malpractice cases ever see the light of day.
Republican Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has signed into law a bill making it more difficult to bring medical malpractice lawsuits in the state. Republican supporters of the bill said it will help attract doctors to the state. Opponents argue that the measure threatens the ability of malpractice victims to recover damages for medical negligence.
What this means is that if a jury concludes that you walked into an emergency room and become paralyzed or die as the result of careless emergency room doctor or nurse, the jury may still find the doctor not responsible under Arizona malpractice law. It is just a bad idea that turns hundreds of years of medical malpractice law on its head.
Metro Verdicts Monthly reports on a $1,558,039 jury award in a medical malpractice case in Prince George’s County. Plaintiff’s malpractice lawsuit alleged median nerve damage as the result of medical malpractice.
Specifically, Plaintiff alleged the doctor negligently performed the carpal tunnel surgery, resulting in permanent damage to the median nerve.
The jury agreed, awarding $ 1,500,000 for non-economic damages, $ 11,251 for past medicals bills; and $ 46,788 for future medicals bills. The verdict was reduced to $ 693,039 due to the Maryland cap on non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases.
The Arizona Star reports that the Arizona legislature is considering a law that would – to put it lightly – make it more difficult for medical malpractice lawyers to recover compensation in medical malpractice cases for their clients. Under the proposed bill, the plaintiffs in medical malpractice cases would be required to prove by “clear and convincing evidence’ that doctor failed to meet the standard of care. A similar bill passed the Arizona legislature in 2006 but was vetoed by former governor Janet Napolitano.
Under this law, juries can reason that while they think the doctor committed medical malpractice, they cannot be “clear and convincing” sure. I would be a bad law that turns the notion of civil justice that we have had in the country from the beginning on its head.
Point of Law suggests that medical malpractice lawyers and their lobbyists are behind the often cited Institute of Medicine’s report that medical malpractice kills 100,000 people a year.
Who knows? How do you argue the methodology without digging through the methodology? I just don’t know. But it is important to point out that the Institute of Medicine was a government agency without a real horse in the race.
I realize that one of the investigators thinks the data was misused and there is talk that drug abuse victims were counted as malpractice deaths. But, really, what if the number is 50,000? That’s almost 3 a day for every state in the United States. Think about that for a second. It is still way too many.
