Where Have All The Doctors Gone?

Where Have All the Doctors Gone?

By: Andrew Herbert

This is an urgent report: Yet again another medical school has gone bankrupt, unable to survive after the recent disinterest in the medical field. There are now only five medical schools left in the country, while the need for doctors continues to arise. This “Doctor Crisis” has swept across the nation like a wildfire, leaving many doctor-less towns and cities in its wake. All of this has happened because malpractice insurance costs have reached astronomical proportions; doctors are unable to afford these rates, and are therefore quitting the field while at the same time promising students are turning away from the medical industry when they realize they can’t succeed. Lines in front of hospitals last several blocks, doctors’ schedules are booked for years in advance, and thousands of people die every year because they couldn’t get to a doctor in time.

Unfortunately, this scenario is an entirely all too real possibility if something isn’t done to curb the abuse of malpractice lawsuits that is rampant in our country. This is not to say that malpractice suits in general are not necessary and that doctors are infallible and therefore should never be sued, because malpractice suits are, in some cases, very necessary. If a doctor does indeed commit an error, then he or she should be held accountable for his or her actions. In this way, malpractice lawsuits help to make sure that those doctors who do not excel at their work pay for their negligence. However, it is also true that there are way too many malpractice suits where the sole aim is to get more money by suing for something that the doctor(s) had little or no control over. In fact, most malpractice lawsuits have nothing to do with actual carelessness. In a recent study by Harvard, results showed that care was not negligent in four out of five malpractice lawsuits filed. These cases are, for the most part, just filed for personal benefit. One example of that would be two trial lawyers in Michigan who picked up a case of a woman who had hemorrhage in the operation room and died a few days later. When the lawyers picked up the case, two years has passed! Needless to say, they had no evidence that the doctors had been negligent, but they still one the case! And when one of the doctors tried to the two lawyers b/c he had good reason to believe their action was groundless, he got thrown out of court! [26] This is just one example of many that shows how far our judicial system has fallen.

If 80% of malpractice suits filed in this day and age are done for frivolous reasons, then who’s to say that number will not grow even higher? Before the 1980s, there were virtually no frivolous malpractice suits filed, but with the advent of trial lawyers and personal injury suits, there came a deluge of frivolous malpractice lawsuits. A new and easy way to make money had been found, even if it had serious side effects for the victims. A recent survey shows that the cost of injury litigation has risen 14 fold in the past two generations! [27] But why is this? Has the care changed any between then and now? No, in general, it hasn’t. If anything, the care has improved due to technological advances in the field of medicine, and stricter regulations regarding the condition of hospitals. That leads us to the conclusion that frivolous malpractice lawsuits are more for money than for any harm received from a doctor; it is a lot like a gold rush: everyone goes where the money is, with no thought for the land they are ruining to get to the gold, and in this case the "land" is the medical industry.

Lawyers began this new way of looking at litigation suits. After so many years of personal injury suits and the like, the general public has begun to see lawsuits the way lawyers do. It is amazing that this one profession so radically changed an entire culture's outlook on lawsuits, but that is what has happened. Unfortunately, this change is not for the better.

Sadly, the scenario described in the first paragraph is already beginning to happen. Two years ago the state of Florida began to feel the effects of frivolous malpractice lawsuits. Many of Florida’s doctors left the state and are still leaving the state, to the point that the Florida Medical Association is recording the doctors that leave. The majority of the doctors that are leaving or have already left are leaving not of their own volition, but because their malpractice insurance is just too high for them too keep practicing there, due to the epidemic of frivolous malpractice suits that has struck Florida. Here is one doctor's reasoning: "...according to national statistics, I will be sued every two years. I have a simple economic decision to make in one or two years. If I can afford insurance, I will stay. If I cannot, I will have no choice but to leave the state to work elsewhere." [28]

If frivolous malpractice suits and their effects are not stopped or fixed, we may soon find America swamped with lawsuits like these, while asking ourselves the question, “Where have all the doctors gone?”: 1) an obese, cigarette-smoking woman who had high cholesterol and blood pressure, and a family history of coronary artery disease had a heart attack and sued her doctors for “not doing enough” to help her;[29] 2) three sisters sued their mother’s doctors for causing undue “emotional distress” when their mom get rushed to the ER; it was not distress caused to their mother, but "...distress caused to them for having to see the doctors rushing to help their mother." [30] 3) someone was prescribed a drug named “Propulsid” by her doctor for a digestive disorder, and then sued the doctor and the “Propuslid” company, even though she admitted that the drug had not harmed her, because she thought she could make an easy couple of thousand dollars by filing the lawsuit.[31] She probably thought she could get away with this because of all the other frivolous malpractice lawsuits that have succeeded. It is sad that it has come to this.

It is this blatant lack of caring for the consequences of one’s actions that has led to so many of these cases being filed, and, in many instances, succeeding! For instance, if the sisters described in number 2 had actually won their case, they would have forced all doctors to keep their patient completely separate from their hospitalized family/friends because if something did go wrong, the family/friends might suffer “emotional distress” and then sue the doctors. Or, if the person in number 3 had one, would doctors ever prescribe drugs again? (people do win cases against drug companies pretty often, but often they are fairly legitimate, or at least are not done on a whim) They probably would, but only with a great deal of fear and not before making completely sure that the drug would not be of any harm to you, which might take a long time considering that every person is different and might react differently to the drug. And, if you needed to have that drug right away? Well, you’d just have to suffer for a while, or have surgery without morphine, or something similar to that. Is this the kind of America we want? I surely hope not. I sincerely hope that my kids will not have to grow up in a world where everyone does indeed ask the question: “Where have all the doctors gone?”

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