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Malpractice Laws Should Focus on Patients

Edward Dauer and Judith Ham
Denver Post, May 26, 2009

Common Good Colorado board members Edward Dauer and Judith Ham write in the Denver Post that the “perennial sport” of debating the size of malpractice award caps – which recently took place in Colorado’s General Assembly – “is a waste of time, words and political energy.”  “More importantly,” they continue, “it is a lost opportunity to accomplish something meaningful for the people whose interests ought to count the most: the patients.”  What patients need, they argue, is a medical liability system that not only fairly and efficiently compensates them for injuries and losses, but one that improves patient safety as well – things our current fault-based tort system doesn’t do, nor higher award caps would improve.  On the issue of patient safety in particular, Dauer and Ham explain: “Increasing doctors' liability does not produce safer health care.  In fact, it impedes in numerous ways health care's own efforts to make itself better.  A fault-based, punitive environment causes error to be denied rather than addressed; drives hospitals and physicians to argue only that they were right, rather than to examine openly how they might have done better; and inhibits information about ‘near misses’ from being collected, analyzed, and turned into useful lessons.”  They call for demonstration projects to test alternative liability systems.   » article

 

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