Current politicians to presidential candidates to the media have documented the American healthcare system and offered potential panaceas. While there is no one solution that can heal the healthcare system, one important culprit is the malpractice system that is driving higher costs.

As the world’s most advanced country, 1 in 7 Americans do not have basic healthcare coverage.

As the world’s most advanced country, 1 in 7 Americans do not have basic healthcare coverage. Another estimate puts uninsured Americans at more than 45 million people.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2007 Health, United States statistics report, healthcare costs have skyrocketed each year, incompassing more and more of a person’s Gross Domestic Product (meaning that people are spending a greater percentage of their income on healthcare related expenses than before). In total, Americans spent more than $2 trillion on healthcare in 2005¹.

The United States has the highest amount of income spent on healthcare expenditures in the world at more than 15%². 

The Healthcare Mess

One driving factor in rising healthcare costs are malpractice suits. To illustrate, consider a doctor who must carry a multi-million dollar insurance policy to ward off malpractice suits. A malpractice suit is a lawsuit brought against a professional such as a doctor for wrongdoings during a procedure.

The current healthcare system punishes patients that are hurt in two ways. First, they are injured by the medical system that was supposed to heal them, and second, they are stuck in a mire of complexity and helplessness in pursuing legal justification.

While only 2 percent of injured patients seek legal compensation today, those that do often seek millions of dollars in pain and suffering. Juries often times award millions of dollars to these injured patients as if they are lottery-winners.

In addition to lofty pain and suffering, high legal fees coerce patients to seek millions of dollars in damages. Lawyers today will usually accept a case only if the payout is great enough to compensate for the time and resources.

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A Lack of Precedents

Decision making in medical malpractice cases lacks guiding policies and standards. Only a small percentage of injured patients are awarded damages because of the difficulty of differentiating between unavoidable injury and malpractice. Court cases should ideally provide precedents for future cases, but judges usually do not give juries instructions about legal standards of healthcare as they do in criminal cases, because. Malpractice is therefore hard to prove.

Insurance to mitigate malpractice risks is the main perpetrator of rising healthcare costs, not higher insurance premiums.

The Solution

The current legal system is ill-equipped to appropriately handle medical malpractice cases. While many healthcare professionals have proposed admirable solutions to healing the American healthcare system, a complete revamp of the legal system would be the only long-standing solution.

Using the Worker’s Compensation System

The healthcare industry needs a court system mirrored after the worker’s compensation system. In the workers’ compensation systems, injured workers submit a claim through their employer to either a board or administrative judge, depending on the state. The verdict is based on several criteria, including the severity of the injury, the degree of disability, and the worker’s pay.

Healthcare Courts would Create Precedents

A healthcare court would create precedents by following the worker’s compensation system. A healthcare court would first have a schedule of benefits to compensate patients for medical injuries. Second, injured patients would receive consistent compensation based on previous awards.

The healthcare court would also refer to a guide of malpractice scenarios, using Accelerated Compensation Events (ACEs). Consider, for instance, a patient who requires additional care because of bleeding after heart surgery; this injured patient would not have to prove medical malpractice because bleeding following surgery is a documented error on behalf of the surgical team. Trivial cases would be dismissed by the review board without backlogging the healthcare court system.

Specialized courts are not a revolutionary or confusing idea. In fact, many European nations already have courts similar to the one proposed above. Many of these nations, including Denmark and Sweden have more advanced healthcare systems. The United States also have similar specialized courts such as the worker’s compensation court.

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References

1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [↩]
2. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [↩]