Medical Malpractice Policy

There has been debate about how the country’s medical malpractice system should be reformed. Such as there have been instances where “Since 1996 only 364 malpractice claims, or 40 per year, have been filed. These numbers suggest that contrary to tort reform rhetoric, lawyers are not filing stacks of frivolous lawsuits against doctors and hospitals even in this judicial hellhole.”(Nelson 2005, pg 362) There has been an issue of the laws turning a blind eye towards malpractice.

For example, in China, “In March 2003, Huang Huiyu, a five-year-old girl who manifested symptoms of vomiting and twitching, was admitted to the People’s Hospital of Puyang, where she received intravenous therapy and had a convulsion associated with a fever higher than 40 degrees Celsius.” Later on she was “discharged from the hospital, she was diagnosed by other hospitals as having an abnormal electroencephalogram, indicative of epilepsy. The patient’s mother, an employee of the defendant hospital, subsequently filed this lawsuit in May 2003, alleging that the hospital’s failure to comply with medical practice rules and treatment protocols produced adverse reactions in the patient and thereby led to the patient’s epilepsy.” But that provided some difficulty when “the district court dismissed the case in November 2004, the plaintiff appealed to the municipal intermediate court, which ordered a retrial on the ground that the major facts are not clear, and the evidence is insufficient.”(Nuannuan)

In the U.S., President Bush once proposed a Health CareLiability Reform and Quality of Care Improvement Act where it represents examines the dialogue between physicians and lawyers, “summarizes the data on issues raised in the adversarial dialogue between the medical and legal communities. The data include the frequency and severity of claims, the frequency of physician negligence, the cost of malpractice insurance, and the practice of defensive medicine”(Thomas 1992, pg 446).

However, in today’s society when ” a 2007 report from the US Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics studied the outcomes of medical malpractice cases closed between 2000 and 2004 in seven states, finding that only about one-third of cases in Maine, Missouri, and Nevada and 12 percent of cases in Illinois ended with a payout.”(Walter 2018, pg 3). While they may seem like a good thing, in reality, the only reason they receive a payout is that “the claim is not settled, and the patient files a lawsuit. If the suit is decided in favor of the plaintiff (the patient), the plaintiff receives some amount of damages, or monetary compensation”(Walter 2018, pg 1).