Guest guest Posted June 26, 2001 Report Share Posted June 26, 2001 ----- Original Message ----- From: MARTHA Tony Lambert Cc: Arden R Moulin Sent: Monday, June 25, 2001 11:43 PM Subject: Medical Malpractice FYI! MM/NSIF Monday | June 25, 2001 The verdict is in on malpractice damages 06/25/2001 By SANDRA G. BOODMAN / The Washington Post Brain damage is worth more than death. A foot injury is potentially more lucrative than a genital injury. Negligence in childbirth cases is worth three times more on average to a victim than failure to diagnose cancer. These are some of the nuggets about medical malpractice payments buried in the "2000 Current Award Trends in Personal Injury," a 54-page statistical compendium that is closely scrutinized by officials of organized medicine, insurance companies and lawyers who represent either doctors or patients in malpractice cases. The report, published annually by Jury Verdict Research, a firm in Horsham, Pa., analyzes 176,000 jury awards and out-of-court settlements collected from every state in 1999. It is one of the few publicly available documents that contains monetary details of malpractice payouts; much of the other detailed research in this area is conducted by insurance companies and is considered proprietary. The 2000 report found that between 1998 and 1999, malpractice payouts increased from an average of $750,000 to $800,000, while settlements for the same years rose more sharply, from a median of $500,000 to $650,000. The largest awards for any type of malpractice case involved negligence in childbirth; such cases resulted in awards averaging $2 million. That was followed by a median of $636,844 for cases involving medication errors; $625,000 for misdiagnosis cases; $300,000 for surgical negligence cases and $230,000 for cases involving sexual improprieties committed by a physician. Although cases involving the death of a patient do not bring the biggest monetary awards – sometimes because patients are terminally ill or old or both – they are the most numerous and accounted for nearly 25 percent of those analyzed in 1999. That was followed by cases involving severe brain damage (9 percent of all cases) and genital injuries (7 percent). Overall punitive damages were rare: Only 3 percent of cases included monetary awards by juries designed to punish doctors or hospitals. Settlements before or during trial mirrored the trend of higher payments for cases involving brain damage rather than death. The average settlement in a brain-damage case was $1.3 million (compared with a median jury verdict of $4.5 million). While insurance companies and physicians' groups point to increases in settlements and the size of jury verdicts as evidence of a looming malpractice crisis, doctors and hospitals still win two-thirds – 65 percent – of malpractice cases brought to trial. And a 1991 Harvard University study, still regarded as one of the most influential of its kind, found that acts of negligence are eight to 10 times more common than malpractice suits. Distributed by Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service Martha Murdock, DirectorNational Silicone Implant FoundationDallas, Texas Headquarters Purposes for which the Corporation (NSIF) is organized are to perform the charitable activities within the meaning of Internal Revenue Code Section 501©(3) and Texas Tax Code Section 11.18 ©(1).Specifically, the Corporation is organized for the purposes of education and research of Silicone-related disease. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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