THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY
THE MEDICAL MALPRACTICE EPIDEMIC CONTINUES UNABATED

In the past year, bills on health insurance and Medicare have contained extreme liability provisions that would threaten the health and safety of all Americans. Though eventually removed from the final versions of these bills, the measures would have:

• Placed an arbitrary $250,000 cap on non-economic damages. This cap on injuries such as the loss of sight and the ability to have children would have a tremendously negative impact on the most seriously injured and would discriminate against women, children and the elderly because they often cannot show substantial economic loss such as lost wages.
• Given immunity from punitive damages to makers of drugs and devices approved by the FDA. Medical products, even though approved by the FDA, nevertheless can be dangerous to patients. Drugs such as DES received the FDA's stamp of approval, only to later turn out to be health hazards. This measure also is completely disingenuous in that its proponents are some of the same people calling for the FDA to be disbanded.

At a time when for-profit, assembly-line medicine is taking over our health care system, why is Congress considering medical liability "reforms?" The following examples make clear that Americans, more than ever, need strong malpractice laws to protect us from abominable medical care.

• Boston Globe health columnist Betsy Lehman, a 39-year-old mother of two, died from a massive overdose of a powerful chemotherapy drug at Boston's prestigious Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. This deadly error was detected by a computer records employee -- not a doctor. The same hospital also gave an overdose of a chemotherapy drug to another woman who is now "seriously and chronically debilitated from irreversible heart damage." (New York Times, 3/27/95).
• At Tampa's University Community Hospital, a surgeon amputated the wrong leg of 51- year-old Willie King. Just two weeks later at the same hospital, 77-year-old Leo Alfonso was killed when a therapist negligently disconnected his ventilator. The surgeon who removed the wrong leg was at it again just three months later, amputating the toe of a woman without her consent. He then tried to cover up his error, claiming that the toe had simply "fallen off." (USA Today, 3/13/95; New York Times, 7/19/95).
• Guadalupe Negron, a 33-year-old mother of four, bled to death after a botched abortion performed by Dr. David Benjamin in Queens, New York. Dr. Benjamin, whose license had been revoked in 1993 for "gross incompetence and negligence" in five separate instances, was nevertheless allowed to practice while the revocation was being appealed. It was during his appeal that he sliced the fatal laceration in Ms. Negron. (New York Times, 9/13/95).
• Rajeswari Ayyappan, the 59-year-old mother of a prominent Indian film star, was brought to world-renowned Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York to have a malignant brain tumor removed. The top neurosurgeon at this hospital operated on the wrong side of her brain. Ms. Ayyappan now suffers from severely impaired vision and no awareness of her left side. Washington Post, 7/25/95).
• In Denver, an 8-year-old boy died during a routine ear operation when the anesthesiologist fell asleep and failed to monitor the boy's condition. That same anesthesiologist had fallen asleep during surgeries numerous times before but was never adequately disciplined. (Los Angeles Times, 8/24/95).
• Two skin cancer patients at the New England Medical Center, 52-year-old Donald Everett and 44-year-old Michael Arsenault, died after being given three times the recommended dosage of the highly toxic drug cisplatin. (Washington Post, 4/18/95).
• A surgeon at Butterworth Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, cut off the wrong breast of a 69-year-old cancer patient during a mastectomy. (USA Today, 3/27/95).
• A 4-year-old child bled to death four days after receiving a tonsillectomy at St. Luke's Hospital in New York. (New York Times, 7/18/95).
• New York's prestigious Long Island Jewish Hospital has recently been the site of two medical horrors. Denise Verbeeck, a mildly retarded, 27-year-old former Special Olympic athlete, died despite receiving successful elective surgery on a damaged kneecap because of incompetence on the part of her anesthesiologist. Lloyd Reback, a 25-year- old bodybuilder, underwent the successful removal of a benign tumor from his chin, but he too suffered horrendous injury after receiving negligent care from an anesthesiologist. He is now in a deep, perhaps permanent, coma with extensive brain damage. (New York Times, 8/1/95).
• At the University of Chicago Hospital, a 41-year-old father of three with a curable form of testicular cancer died just five days before Father's Day after receiving an overdose of a chemotherapeutic drug. (New York Times, 7/18/95).
• A Milwaukee laboratory was charged with reckless homicide after its misreading of Pap smears led to the deaths of two women from cervical cancer. (New York Times, 7/18/95).
• Three infants in a Maryland hospital were mistakenly given morphine due to a mix-up of medicine bottles, but luckily did not suffer any permanent injuries. (USA Today, 3/27/95).
• Cancer patient Harry Jordan checked into a California hospital to have his diseased kidney taken out, but surgeons for some inexplicable reason removed the healthy kidney instead. Mr. Jordan was forced to spend the rest of his life on dialysis and suffered untold financial hardship due to California's harsh $250,000 cap on non-economic damages. (USA Today, 4/14/95).
• At Osteopathic Medical Center of Texas, doctors removed the wrong lung of 59-year-old Benjamin Jones, leaving him with one cancerous lung. After botching this operation, doctors then conspired to cover up their mistakes by suppressing information and falsifying documents. Jones died soon after this medical catastrophe. (Fort Worth Star- Telegram, 12/11/94).
• A hospital in Florida cut off the air supply for 56 patients for almost 15 minutes. The error left a 55-year-old women in critical condition. (New York Times, 6/15/95).
• A surgeon in Boston removed the wrong kidney from a patient after failing to check x- rays that would have revealed this tragic error. (Boston Globe, 6/1/96).
• A doctor in Las Vegas failed to remove a patient's appendix during an appendectomy. Although the doctor had severed it and stitched the stump, he neglected to extract it from the patient's body. The appendix ate its way through the patient's skin, resulting in a hole in his stomach. (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 4/24/96).

DON'T LET THEM GET AWAY WITH IT!

The Medical Industry's Stealth Campaign to Escape Responsibility for Bad Medicine
What if a jumbo jet crashed every single day for the next year? Would Americans stand for it? Would we fly? Of course not! We would not let the airline industry get away with such an abysmal record.

Yet the number of deaths caused by bad medicine each year roughly equals a jumbo jet crash every 24 hours for an entire year. More than 95,000 Americans are killed annually due in part to medical malpractice, according to extrapolations from the Harvard Medical Practice Study. Hundreds of thousands more are injured. Nevertheless, only a few doctors and hospitals are ever disciplined, and even then most of the sanctions are for substance abuse or fraud rather than negligence.

At a time when huge spending cuts and the advent of assembly-line medicine threaten the quality of health care, the last thing Congress should do is tear down the only safety net protecting patients from malpractice. But the medical industry, rather than trying to eliminate senseless errors that add an estimated $60 billion to the nation's health care bill, instead pushes unprecedented malpractice "reform" legislation every chance it gets.

This legislation would let the medical industry get away with bad medicine. It would arbitrarily limit jury awards for "non economic damages," such as loss of fertility or gross disfigurement. It would throw case-by-case adjudication out the window and harm the most severely injured patients, since their damages are likely to exceed the artificial limit.

This legislation would apply not only to malpractice, but also to claims against the makers of defective medical devices and health care insurers which act in bad faith. It also would erect procedural hurdles for injured patients, and absolutely bar claims that arise more than five years after an alleged injury, even if the patient could not have discovered it within that time period.

The medical industry should not get away with its attempts to immunize itself from bad medicine. If the industry wants to debate malpractice, it should do so in the open and not try to sneak special interest legislation past the American people. The attached materials document the lurid toll of malpractice and how the medical industry has covered up this epidemic.

http://www.maryalice.com/reform/medicine.asp