Medical Malpractice Litigation: How It Works, Why Tort Reform Hasn't Helped.

• Author: Kapp, Marshall B.

Medical Malpractice Litigation: How It Works, Why Tort Reform Hasn't Helped

By Bernard S. Black, et al.

Over the last year especially, public policy makers have been reminded continually about their obligation to "follow the science." In crafting legislation and regulation, other considerations often make it difficult to adhere to this admonition. One arena in which different participants' conflicting emotional, political, and economic interests intensely, powerfully exacerbate this difficulty is the resolution of legal claims averring that medical malpractice has caused patient injuries. Useful, accessible data regarding the actual operation of the medical malpractice claims system in the U.S. is limited; successful projects examining and interpreting the available data carefully and objectively in order to turn it into credible information and then action are rare.

Medical Malpractice Litigation endeavors to address some of the scientific knowledge deficiencies hampering fair and effective lawmaking on this front. Through review of the scant empirical literature, deep analyses of public albeit incomplete data sets, and informal interviews with key informants, an economist (Paik) and four respected law professors with expertise in quantitative social science research confront and challenge a number of longstanding, semi-sacred myths about medical malpractice propounded in lawmaking forums by the plaintiffs' bar, patients' rights advocates, health-care professionals and their trade associations, and the insurance defense bar. Various factual conclusions presented here will be displeasing to combatants on all sides of the medical malpractice policy battle, but informative to lawmakers who should be considering their constituents' emotionally, politically, and economically based demands in light of research-revealed "scientific" realities that often contradict extravagant, unsupported partisan advocacy.

Proponents of tort reform will be disappointed by what Black and colleagues have to say regarding (among other things) the dubious existence of periodic medical malpractice litigation crises since the 1970s (as opposed to cyclical business planning-induced problems with liability...