[pickledpepperRN]

http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/ftcr/co/co004761.php3

Dec 12, 2004
When the Incentive to Save a Life Dies;
Under state law, it may be cheaper to let children die from malpractice.
by Jamie Court

The following commentary was published in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday, December 12, 2004. Jamie Court is the president of the Santa Monica-based Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights and the author of "Corporateering" (Tarcher/Putnam).
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The medical horror stories at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center have an important moral you might not have considered: If you are a poor patient in a sick hospital in California, your life is too cheap.

A hospital pathologist with a record of misdiagnoses overlooks a patient's breast cancer. Cost: $25,000 settlement.

An 11-year-old dies after King/Drew doctors remove her healthy appendix without ever diagnosing the pancreatitis that killed her. Cost: $100,000 settlement with the girl's mother.

The pittance that hospitals and doctors pay for the medical nightmares they create in California is a big factor in why negligence at King/Drew was ignored for so long and why it will occur elsewhere.

The culprit is a 1975 law that few Californians know about unless they are victims of medical malpractice. Under the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act, or MICRA, the most an injured patient can recover absent tangible expenses -- such as lost wages or medical bills not covered by health insurance -- is $250,000. In 1975 dollars that amount is equivalent to $71,000 today.

So when a minor dies -- with no lost wages to consider -- the most the family can receive in court is $250,000, from which an attorney's fees are deducted. That makes it cheaper to let children die from malpractice in California hospitals than to save them, if the malpractice would cause them to face lifelong medical bills for which negligent doctors or hospitals are liable....