A Tampa, Florida, man has the wrong leg amputated. Yet at the same time, Americans are justifiably concerned about access to and quality of care. Given our anxiety over the quality of care, the last thing we ought to do is gut the laws that protect us and make sure the medical industry does not get away with bad medicine. Restricting injured patients' rights will do nothing to rein in runaway health care costs because medical malpractice premiums amount to less than 1 percent of those costs, according to a 1992 U.S. Congressional Budget Office report. The medical industry's inability to contain the malpractice epidemic adds tremendously to the nation's health care bill.
Medical malpractice is all too common in America.
According to extrapolations from the Harvard study, more than 95,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of injuries nationwide were due in part to negligent medical care in one year alone. However, the Harvard researchers found that only one in eight incidents of medical malpractice ever resulted in a legal claim by an injured patient. Of all torts, only 7 percent involved any type of professional malpractice, including medical negligence, it reported. Also, an American Medical Association publication stated in 1992 that the malpractice claims rate has dropped at an average annual rate of 8.9 percent since 1985. Wrong drug prescriptions are a major cause of medical injury, according to a July 1995 Journal of the American Medical Association article.