TORT REFORM

My last tour in Vietnam resulted in five months of physical agony. As a result of a booby-trap, I received shrapnel in my legs, back, buttocks and arm, and severe concussion burns on my legs. I was medically evacuated from the field of combat and went through a number of military aid stations, surgical wards, and hospitals.

Due to a succession of medically incompetent people I was not initially sent to a hospital where I would receive prime medical care, but shuffled through several base camp medical stations. Upon my arrival at one station, it was discovered that my bandages had been on so long that they had welded to my wounds through dried blood, pus, and tentative healing. I was soaked in a warm bath overnight before the bandages could be removed and even then chunks of skin and flesh were removed with them.

After it was finally determined that my wounds were severe in nature (the major holes and lead in my body would tell any idiot that). I was finally sent to Okinawa and on to the continental United States for treatment. If I had to rate the treatment I received in most of those medical facilities on a scale of one to ten, I’d have to give them a minus ten.

Which brings me to the subject of this article, Tort Reform.

As laymen, we have a tendency to place doctors high on a pedestal. In our eyes they can do no wrong. After all, we tell ourselves, they go through twenty years of schooling and must pass incredibly hard examinations and so forth and so on. I would agree with this concept except for the fact that Doctors are also human and subject to human errors and human judgement.

Over time I have read in the newspapers and other journals a disturbing number of medical blunders that infest the medical profession. Blunders such as amputating the wrong leg, leaving surgical instruments, sponges, clamps and such inside the body, unnecessary surgery, improper diagnosis, life threatening prescriptions, incompetence, lack of intern supervision, and the list goes on and on.

The dictionary describes tort as a willful or negligent injury to a plaintiff’s person, property or reputation. Most laypersons, and I include myself in this category, think of tort reform as an attempt to stop greedy lawyers from padding their client’s cases so they can reap enormous financial windfalls. We automatically assume that the nasty attorneys are the ones who force the insurance companies to charge incomprehensible premiums for medical insurance and the poor doctors have to dance to the music.

While considering this assumption we should ask ourselves what price are we willing to put on our lives or on the health and welfare of our family members?  If a loved one is handicapped by an incompetent diagnosis how much is that worth? What price do you ask for if you lose the use of your legs, your eyes, your hearing? What if a surgeon, through incompetence or neglect, maims your child for the remainder of their lives? How much is that worth? What price do you put on the unnecessary death of a loved one?

There are cases where no amount of financial gain can replace what you have sacrificed or lost! However, knowing that the incompetent physician who caused your pain is being held accountable is at least a minor comfort. This is also a reliable way of getting rid of the ones who have no professional, ethical or moral right to call themselves physicians. As for the massive number of frivolous lawsuits, any judge worthy of the title should be able to control them.

As a professional in any position I have held, competency has always been the deciding factor. In the military those who fail to measure up are quickly gotten rid of. Therefore, should the question be tort reform or malpractice reform? Do we get rid of the penalty or the incompetent? Then again, based on the phenomenal profits of insurance companies, perhaps we should think seriously about insurance reform. But, that is another article in and of itself.

At a guess I’d estimate 99.9 percent of doctors are professionally competent, but I may be a little too generous in this estimate. I am willing to also state that I believe that at least 90 percent of attorneys adhere to a highly professional code of moral ethics.

As for tort reform my personal advice would be, “Physician heal thyself.”

If any physician is aware of any medical practitioner who is borderline incompetent, dangerously negligent in their practice, or a danger to their patients, they have an obligation to report, reform, or get rid of these individuals. Honest mistakes can be made; dishonest or incompetent mistakes must be paid for. No incompetent doctors, no high insurance premiums!

As for those attorneys who protect patients from these few incompetents, I certainly wish I had a few on my side when those Army saw-bones were having their go at me and some of my friends. I can still hear the screams of agony as one doctor grabbed a friend’s badly wounded knee and started twisting and pulling it while all the time saying he was going to courts martial him if he didn’t stop screaming; no anesthetic given of course!