Source Of Medical Malpractice Suits: Medical ErrorsThe source of medical malpractice is naturally medical errors, at least in theory. This concerns what an average doctor should have been able to do and should have been aware of when treating a patient. Other conditions and potential surgeries of a patient may have required extraordinary skill. What type of medical care one receives, and what the results of treatment will be is to a certain extent a question of luck. Doctors often do their best to save a patient who have a condition that is often curable, but do not succeed. The best example of this is cancer. Many cancers are cured. Other cancers have an 80 or 90-percent cure rate, but that doesn't mean the patients not cured are all potential medical malpractice cases. A Federal Commission of Malpractice found in January 2005, that key to limiting medical malpractice is for states to discipline those doctors who have repeatedly shown themselves to be incompetent. Part of their medical malpractice problem could be dealt with by having state medical boards act to properly police substandard practice by doctors. The U.S. Congress passed legislation to improve the reporting and evaluation of the significance of medical errors. There is still fear of doctors being put out of business by the high expenses of medical insurance. Most of the legislation is based on balancing the need for being able to sue for avoidable error, with having medical malpractice insurance becoming prohibitably expensive. There is still fear among the politicians to limit jury awards, and legislation to do that was rejected. Such an approach was already passed in Texas. Obviously, if you cap total awards in medical malpractice suits, then insurance costs can go down. The question is, is it really just to limit all cases to $250,000 for an individual medical provider and $750,000 for a team of medical providers? So far, Congress has not agreed to this. This is obviously a very difficult issue to decide. In one state, a bill was passed to cap non-economic damages on medical malpractices, such as pain and suffering. The bill was actually thrown out by the state courts as being unconstitutional. Other states have continued to have limits on non-economic awards in place. Finally, another approach tried in the state of New Jersey, is to have the state subsidy doctors' insurance payment in certain extra high risk medical specialties, such as obstetricians |