If your doctor is nervous about John Edwards, you should let your doctor know that malpractice damage caps, or responsibility caps as I like to call them, didn't have any effect on insurance rates here in California. The problem isn't lawyers preying on doctors. It's the insurance companies that are the problem.
In fact in the first decade after caps were passed in California, insurance premiums rose 175%.
It wasn't until Proposition 103, which regulated the insurance industry, passed that medical practice rates stabilized. Between 1988 and 2000 rates actually fell 8% in California while nationally they rose 25%.
But the law which limits responsibility for doctors is still on the books here, and it can have horrible consequences for patients.
Economic damages cannot always be anticipated. California juries are not informed of the cap on non-economic damages, so they are often not careful about apportioning economic damages. In one famous case, for example, Harry Jordan, a Long Beach man, was hospitalized to have a cancerous kidney removed but the surgeon took out his healthy kidney instead. A jury awarded Jordan more than $5 million dollars, but the judge was required to reduce the verdict to $250,000 due to California's cap on "non-economic" damages - plus a mere $6,000 in "economic costs". Jordan, who lived for years on 10% kidney function, could no longer work, though the jury (which lawfully can not be notified about the "non- economic" cap) did not take this into account. Jordan's court costs -- not including attorney fees -- amounted to more than $400,000 and his medical bills, that arose after frequently being denied by insurers, totaled more than $500,000. He paid $1700 per month in health insurance.
Malpractice insurers are clearly deceiving their customers, but for some reason doctors keep falling for it.
"The American Medical Association says that 100 doctors were put out of business last year in West Virginia because of rising medical malpractice insurance rates, yet the damages paid out in West Virginia dropped by 31 percent during the same period. If that $15 million in savings didn't help, how would damage caps solve the problem?" Claybrook asked.
The reality is that more than half of all the damages paid out by malpractice insurers are caused by about 5% of all doctors. But for some reason these doctors are rarely discplined, despite the fact that they often are repeat offenders.
These bad doctors are allowed to go on practicing medicine despite the fact that taking them out of business would save everyone money on malpractice insurance, and the fact that medical errors are the sixth leading cause of death in the country.