On our website, we provide an overview of ProAssurance, which is one of the top three providers of medical malpractice insurance in Maryland.
It is easy to forget that most Maryland nursing homes were mom-and-pop shops. The beginning of the end was in 1965 when President Johnson successfully passed Medicare and Medicaid legislation which meant that governement would begin footing the bill for many nursing home residents. Like day follows night, so too did investor money.
There is no question that some of these mom-and-pop nursing homes were downright horror shows. Some of the abuse and neglect stories would make today's nursing home game seem too good to be true. But there was also a lot of great care when people, instead of corporations, were running the show.
Now, we have less nursing home atrocities but we have standardized marginal care. The first problem is the lack of human touch. If you live in my house, I realize the buck stops with me. In a nursing home, everyone passes the buck. This complacancy is coupled with a profit incenitve to provide the most expensive nursing home care possible at the lowest possible cost. With so many nursing homes taking Medicare, you can't increase revenues. So you can only increase cost.
These problems manifested themselves quickly. Here is a Baltimore Sun article from 1970 wherein Ralph Nadar is already sounding the alarm. Congress saw it, too, and enacted legislation in the late 60s and early 70s to combat the problem. But, not unlike 2011, the bills that got passed were watered down versions of what they should have been. So instead of focusing on residents' care, these bills mostly focused on facility maintenance. So nursing homes continued to run largely amok. Nursing home in Maryland complain the problem is nursing home lawyers which is really failing to meet Step 1 in the 12 step process. The actual reality is that nursing home lawsuits in Maryland - with exceptions to be sure - are a part of the solution, not the problem.
The
federal government is trying a different tactic now
and trying to push Medicare recipients away
from institutional
care and
towards home based care. One
government incentive program would likely require Maryland to raise its share of
Medicare
funding for long-term, non-institutional
care from 38 percent to 50 percent over the next few years.
Great idea. But in the short run, nursing homes are going to lose revenue. What are they likely to do? Cut costs. Which means even worse care for nursing home residents.
If you or someone you know is caught up in this mess and needs Maryland nursing home lawyer, call 800-553-8082 or get a free online consultation.
Chuck Grassley, a senior United States senator from Iowa, is continuing his efforts with regard to restoring public access of data on malpractice payouts, hospital discipline, and regulatory sanctions against doctors and other health professionals - as well as to hold accountable the federal government official who shut down access to this information.
On October 7, 2011, Chuck Grassley wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Rockville, Maryland, stating that The National Practifioner Data Bank's (NPDB's) Public Use File (PUF) serves as "the backbone in providing transparency for bad acting healthcare practitioners" and explained that the data has been used for years by researchers and consumer groups to calculate trends in disciplinary action by state medical boards. His letter was in response to the removal of the database by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). The database was removed after a reporter was able to identify a physician's data bank record by comparing the de-identified information with state court records.
Chuck Grassley received a response to that letter, one that he called "incomplete, even while revealing that the HRSA prematurely jumped to conclusions regarding a reporter who used publicly available information to track down the identity of a doctor with a record of malpractice cases." Grassley stated that it looks like the HRSA was trying to protect a single physician who had a malpractice suit and disciplinary action filed against him, and in doing so, the federal government undermined its own mandate to "enhance the quality of healthcare, encourage greater efforts in professional peer review and restrict the ability of incompetent healthcare practitioners to relocate without discovery of previous substandard performance or unprofessional conduct."
Chuck Grassley has said that whoever made the decision to remove the database needs to be held accountable, and that the Public Use File in question should be fully restored on the HRSA website. "Department officials are misguided if they think they can make this issue go away with the response sent to my first letter of inquiry," Grassley said. "This database contains information intended for public consumption, and efforts to shutter access will be fought by those of us committed to transparency where public dollars and the public interest are at stake."
Section 3-2A-04(b) of the Courts and Judicial Proceedings Article requires medical malpractice plaintiffs in Maryland the requirement that they file, within a prescribed time, a certificate of a "qualified expert" attesting to the defendant's departure from the applicable standard of care and that the said departure proximately caused the plaintiff's alleged injuries. The statute states that the plaintiff's claim or action "shall be dismissed, without prejudice, if the plaintiff fails to file a certificate of a qualified expert...."
So who is a qualified expert? The term "qualified expert" is not specifically defined by the statute although the statute does have provisions that set forth the necessary qualifications that an expert must give for a Maryland medical malpractice case to proceed. The statute sets forth the requirement that the certificate may not be signed by a party, an employee or partner of a party, or an employee or stockholder of any professional corporation of which the party is a stockholder. Section 3-2A-04(b)(4) also sets forth the controversial 20% rule: an expert may not devote annually more than 20 percent of his professional activities to activities that directly involve testimony in personal injury cases.
What are professional activities? That is the subject of another blog post.
How much money you can recover for a misdiagnosis medical malpractice case varies based on the type of injury. But there are statistics that can possibly give you some idea of the neighborhood of misdiagnosis verdicts. One recent study found that plaintiffs are awarded on average $713,457 in malpractice misdiagnosis cases.
That number misleads a bit. Only 15% of the verdicts exceeded $1 million. Large verdicts clearly distort the data. Does this give you a better idea of what the value of your misdiagnosis case might be? Ultimately, I don't think it does. But I do think victims find some comfort in knowing the average verdict number because they know how serious their injuries are and may understand the likelihood of proving malpractice. From this, they can try to piece together the question of whether it is worth the trouble to pursue a medical malpractice lawsuit against their doctor.
How many doctors are committing medical malpractice? The reality is not many doctors are regularly committing malpractice on their patients. But a small percentage of doctors get a disproportionate amount of medical malpractice claims. For all of the chatter about what is to be done to reduce medical malpractice lawsuits, meaningful change will not come until we can do a better job of policing that minority of doctors.
Doctors do not do a great job of policing themselves. Lawyers do a much better job. I see you rolling your eyes. So let me explain.
Lawyers are ultimately judged by our bosses: judges. There is a built in distance between these two brands of lawyers that allows for better oversight. Doctors are being judged by other doctors. Totally different arrangement.
What is the better solution to disciplining bad doctors? I don't know. This post just identifies the problem.
Breast cancer malpractice lawsuits are common because of advances in modern technology: we can beat breast cancer in the vast majority of cases if we can catch it early. If breast cancer is detected on or before the Stage II, the 5-year survival rate is generally over 80 percent and even higher for otherwise healthy people.
Conversely, if breast cancer is not detected until it has reached stage III, the 5-year survival rate drops to roughly 54%. Even at Stage III, most woman are going to survive and thrive. In the minority of these Stage III cases with unsuccessful outcomes, tere are so challenges because of some problematic ruling by the Maryland high court in loss of chancer wrongful death cases.
The "best" cases - and it feels awful writing that - are Stage IV cases that should have been caught at Stage I or Stage II. For Stage IV breast cancer, the 5-year survival rate is approximately 20%.
It is unbelievably important to remember when you are looking at breast cancer statistics that they are just that, statistics. Everyone is different and this is a disease - at every stage - that a lot of women beat.
There is a non-stop methodical effort by malpractice tort reform advocates to find creative way to limit malpractice lawsuits. For whatever reason, a lot of this creativity seems to come from Florida. The latest? Deem doctors "agents of the state" to avail themselves to local/state government tort claims immunities.
In many personal injury cases, just the mechanics of filing suit dramatically increases the value. One leitmotif of a problem: serving the defendant. If, for whatever reason, someone does not want to be served, they are hard to serve with a complaint and summons.
This is a motion for alternative service for personal injury lawyers who are having difficult serving the defendant(s).
Ohio adopted at pain and suffering cap of 250,000 except in catastrophic cases in 2004. The hope was to decrease health care costs.
Ohio, how is that working out for you? In 2008, four years after Ohio introduced these caps, health insurance for Ohio families in employer plans had gone up by 19 percent.