Claim: U.S. doctors on coronavirus frontline seek protection from malpractice suits.
Verdict: SUPPORTS

Retrieved passages:
title: Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus
text: risky. Not studying it is riskier." Dr. Zaki was fired from his job at the hospital as a result of bypassing the Saudi ministry of health in his announcement and sharing his sample and findings. At their annual meeting of the World Health Assembly in May 2013, WHO chief Margaret Chan declared that intellectual property, or patents on strains of new virus, should not impede nations from protecting their citizens by limiting scientific investigations. Deputy Health Minister Ziad Memish raised concerns that scientists who held the patent for the MERS-CoV virus would not allow other scientists to use patented material

title: HONOReform
text: represented 19 of the 99 Nebraska patients in their malpractice claims. HONOReform was founded in 2007 using settlement funds Evelyn McKnight secured in her malpractice trial. HONOReform was established to advocate patient justice, safety, and compassion by promoting the lessons learned from hepatitis outbreaks. Since its formation, HONOReform advocates have lobbied the U.S. Congress and federal health agencies for greater oversight of private physician offices and other stand-alone healthcare facilities. HONOReform has fought to raise awareness to widely accepted healthcare standards that call for using syringes and similar products once. In addition to its federal advocacy efforts, HONOReform leaders have

title: Health care quality
text: on avoiding medical malpractice. Health care professionals are not immune to lawsuits; therefore, health care organizations have taken initiatives to establish protocols specifically to reduce malpractice litigation. Malpractice concerns can result in defensive medicine, or threat of malpractice litigation, which can compromise patient safety and care by inducing additional testing or treatments. One widely used form of defensive medicine is ordering costly imaging which can be wasteful. However, other defensive behaviors may actually reduce access to care and pose risks of physical harm. Many specialty physicians report doing more for patients, such as using unnecessary diagnostic tests, because of malpractice

title: Middle East respiratory syndrome
text: pneumonia and acute renal failure. After routine diagnostics failed to identify the causative agent, Zaki contacted Ron Fouchier, a leading virologist at the Erasmus Medical Center (EMC) in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for advice. Fouchier sequenced the virus from a sample sent by Zaki. Fouchier used a broad-spectrum "pan-coronavirus" real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) method to test for distinguishing features of a number of known coronaviruses (such as OC43, 229R, NL63, and SARS-CoV), as well as for RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp), a gene conserved in all coronaviruses known to infect humans. While the screens for known coronaviruses were all negative, the

title: Medical Protective
text: Medical Protective, "AAA" and "A++" respectively. 2007 - Medical Protective insures stand-alone surgery centers, cancer treatment centers, dialysis centers and imaging centers, and forges partnerships with specialty organizations and associations to offer solutions to their members. Medical Protective MedPro Group, formerly known as Medical Protective, is an American liability insurance company for physicians and dentists. Medical Protective traces its roots back to a predecessor company, the Physicians’ Guarantee Company. Alpheus P. Buchman, MD and Miles F. Porter, MD, both of Fort Wayne, Indiana, formed the Physicians' Guarantee Company in 1899 to provide pre-paid legal defense services for medical malpractice lawsuits.

title: Medical Protective
text: Medical Protective MedPro Group, formerly known as Medical Protective, is an American liability insurance company for physicians and dentists. Medical Protective traces its roots back to a predecessor company, the Physicians’ Guarantee Company. Alpheus P. Buchman, MD and Miles F. Porter, MD, both of Fort Wayne, Indiana, formed the Physicians' Guarantee Company in 1899 to provide pre-paid legal defense services for medical malpractice lawsuits. The company is considered one of the first companies to offer pre-paid legal defense services in the United States. In 1902, Physicians’ Guarantee Company changed its name to the Physicians’ Defense Company. In 1907, Byron H.

title: Healthcare Quality Improvement Act
text: by the U.S. Court of Appeals on the grounds that existing Oregon statutes already protected the peer review committee members from prosecution and that these protections should extend to federal antitrust suits brought by individuals for monetary (but not injunctive) relief.) Soon thereafter Congressman Wyden introduced HCQIA in an effort to extend state peer review immunities on a federal level. The rising numbers of medical malpractice lawsuits during the preceding decade played a factor in the passage of the act. It was claimed that physicians with a history of malpractice suits could move easily from state to state with no

title: Medical malpractice in the United States
text: Court of California, the state's non-economic damages caps are "not a legislative attempt to estimate the true damages suffered by plaintiffs, but rather an attempt to control and reduce medical malpractice insurance costs by placing a predictable, uniform limit on the defendant's liability for noneconomic damages." Texas law creates the most difficult "hurdles" in the United States for a plaintiff to succeed in recovering damages for any medical malpractice, even for such objective cases such as an emergency room exposure to the Ebola virus disease. Texas passed a "tort reform" law taking effect on September 1, 2003. The act limited

title: Medical malpractice in the United States
text: of the American public also vastly underestimate the extent of medical errors. Recent research has shown that while both health consumers and health producers are concerned about some of the adverse consequences of healthcare litigation, health consumers perceive that increased healthcare litigation can reduce the incentives for negligence on the part of healthcare providers. At the same time, studies of these claims have found that there is no problem of increasing malpractice verdicts and insurance costs driving doctors out of business. The traditional approach to liability reform is to limit the amount of damages that can be recovered by a

title: HONOReform
text: an audiologist who was battling a recurrence of breast cancer when she learned she had been infected with hepatitis C because improper injection safety protocols at the Fremont Cancer Center. During chemotherapy treatments, medical professionals access multi-dose bags of saline to flush patient ports. Outbreaks occur as a result of doctors and nurses reusing syringes, contaminating the saline bag with the blood of multiple patients. Tom McKnight – Evelyn’s husband – is a local family practice physician who helped uncover the outbreak when some of his patients were found to have hepatitis C. Travis Bennington is a local attorney who

title: Medical tourism agent
text: fix it... But the idea of suing for multimillions of dollars for damages is not going to be something you can do outside the U.S."" However, Americans and Europeans going overseas as medical tourists may not be able to take effective legal action if they are dissatisfied with their experience. The Medical Protection Society, a British group, is responsible for indemnifying doctors in many countries, including Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Brunei, which increases the level of protection enjoyed both by patients locally as well as those coming in as medical tourists. This service is not free. There are many

title: Medical tourism
text: currently presenting themselves as attractive medical tourism destinations provide some form of legal remedies for medical malpractice, these legal avenues may be unappealing to the medical tourist. Should problems arise, patients might not be covered by adequate personal insurance or might be unable to seek compensation via malpractice lawsuits. Hospitals and/or doctors in some countries may be unable to pay the financial damages awarded by a court to a patient who has sued them, owing to the hospital and/or the doctor not possessing appropriate insurance cover and/or medical indemnity. Issues can also arise for patients who seek out services that

title: Medical Protective
text: that healthcare providers are increasingly being sued, Dr. Alpheus P. Buchman and others create Physicians' Guarantee Company (PGC) to provide pre-paid legal defense coverage. 1902 - PGC changes its name to Physicians' Defense Company (PDC), with Dr. Miles F. Porter as President, and Dr. Charles A.L. Reed (President of the AMA) on the board of directors. 1907 - Medical Protective is founded by Byron H. Somers and Charles M. Niezer and offers pre-paid legal defense coverage to healthcare providers. 1910 - Medical Protective expands coverage to include indemnity coverage. Medical Protective offers medical professional liability insurance policies with limits of

title: Medical malpractice in the United States
text: Center of Las Colinas v Bush", 122 S.W. 3d 835 (Tex. 2003), "following orders" may not protect nurses and other non-physicians from liability when committing negligent acts. Relying on vicarious liability or direct corporate negligence, claims may also be brought against hospitals, clinics, managed care organizations or medical corporations for the mistakes of their employees and contractors. In 2013, BMJ Open performed a study in which they found that "failure to diagnose" accounted for the largest portion of medical malpractice claims brought against health professionals. Furthermore, the study found that the most common result of this negligence was death of

title: Tort reform
text: model for tort reform in health care. Others deny that medical malpractice suits play a significant role in the cost of health care. Including legal fees, insurance costs, and payouts, the cost of all US malpractice suits comes to less than one-half of 1 percent of health-care spending. Other recent research suggests that malpractice pressure makes hospitals more efficient, not less so: "The recent focus by the American Medical Association and physicians about the dramatic increases in medical malpractice insurance premiums, and their suggestion of a cap on non-economic damages, deserves a closer look. According to Baicker and Chandra (2004),

title: 2012 Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus outbreak
text: said virus. The Evangelista Medical Hospital in San Pedro, Laguna, the facility where the patient was first admitted, was temporarily closed by DOH for fourteen days. On 17 February 2015, all those who had exposure or had contact with the said nurse were tested negative of the said virus. On 6 March 2015, The Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed three Filipino female healthcare workers in Saudi Arabia who were infected with MERS-CoV. On 6 July 2015, DOH confirmed the second detected case of MERS-CoV in the country. The patient who had contracted the virus was from the Middle East and

title: 2012 Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus outbreak
text: government, in November 2013, reported a woman in Spain, who had recently traveled to Saudi Arabia for the Islamic pilgrimage, contracted the disease. On 14 April 2014, one Filipino paramedic died in the United Arab Emirates, with six other reported to be infected with the virus. On 17 April, the UAE Ministry of Health reported another fatality and four additional cases, including the Filipino medical worker who travelled to the Philippines on 16 April. On 21 April 2014, the Health Ministry of UAE reported an additional 9 cases. In April 2012, six hospital workers were diagnosed with acute respiratory failure

title: 2012 Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus outbreak
text: St Thomas's Hospital. As a result of Dr Zaki's post on Pro-MED, the novel coronavirus was quickly identified. He was treated for respiratory disease and, like the first patient in Saudi Arabia, died of renal failure in October 2012. Another patient who had been in Guys and St Thomas hospital in the UK since September 2012 after visiting the Middle East died on 28 June 2013. A spokesperson for the hospital stated that "Guys and St Thomas can confirm that the patient with severe respiratory illness due to novel coronavirus (MERS-COV) sadly died on Friday 28 June, after his condition

title: Bovine coronavirus
text: nasal washes – which identifies the viral antigen. The haemagglutination inhibition test can be used to establish the strain of coronavirus. Animals should be treated symptomatically. The disease can be controlled by vaccinating the dam with a live vaccine (ATCvet code QI02) whilst she is pregnant as this provides antibodies to the virus in the colostrum. Additional management factors such as ensuring adequate colostrum intake in newborn calves, using appropriate hygiene methods and ventilation of housing reduce disease incidence. Bovine coronavirus Bovine coronavirus (BCV) is as a member of the Coronaviridae family which are enveloped, single-stranded, positive-sense RNA viruses with

title: Coronavirus
text: 2013, a case of contamination from human to human in France was confirmed by the French Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. In addition, cases of person-to-person transmission have been reported by the Ministry of Health in Tunisia. Two confirmed cases seem to have caught the disease from their late father, who became ill after a visit to Qatar and Saudi Arabia. By Oct. 30 2013, there were 124 cases and 52 deaths in Saudi Arabia. After the Dutch Erasmus Medical Centre sequenced the virus, the virus was given a new name, Human Corona Virus-Erasmus Medical Centre (HCoV-EMC). The final