One of the finest legal organizations that we as Pennsylvania trial lawyers belong to is the Pennsylvania Association for Justice (PAJ). This organization is restricted to only litigation attorneys devoted to helping those who are injured due to other’s negligence and to help the consumer get a fair shake in Pennsylvania. The following is a short article from PAJ dealing with the number of medical malpractice claims filed versus the number of serious medical errors which occur here in Pennsylvania. The source of the information comes directly from the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
Although the primary mandate of medical care since Hippocrates is to “first, do no harm” recent years have seen a prioritization of “tort reform” over all other issues affecting healthcare. At least twenty-seven states have now adopted some form of tort reform, which focuses on restricting the rights of victims rather than on safety or transparency as to the nature and amount of preventable errors. However, no state that has enacted tort reform has shown any reduction in healthcare costs, nor has any tort reform state reported a reduction in the incidence of malpractice.
Since Pennsylvania enacted tort reform several years ago, there has been a dramatic reduction in the number of malpractice lawsuits filed.
For example, since 2002 medical malpractice claims have fallen from approximately 27,000 lawsuits per year to approximately 1,600. However, from 2005 through 2008 (since Pennsylvania began requiring medical errors to be reported by healthcare providers), the “serious error” rate has ranged from approximately 7,000 in 2005; 7,000 in 2006; a little over 7,000 in 2007 and over 8,000 in 2008. Although the number of lawsuits have significantly dropped, the number of medical errors reported from healthcare providers has risen dramatically. Moreover, the number of serious errors to be reported will be increasing in the future when nursing homes are brought under the reporting requirements of the Safety Authority. Think about this, Who is getting the bad deal? The medical profession of the injured consumer?
Peter J. Hart, Esquire
