Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveZ
Always willing to learn, and am open-minded enough to realize that no profession is comprised solely of saints or sinners.
I would wonder if that "very significant number" of unscrupulous PI attorneys match the number of physicians who subject patients to the inconvenience, discomfort, pain and expense of medical tests which have no purpose other than to provided padded protection for the physician's butt in case one of those "preventable medical errors" occur; or match the number of medical practitioners who make knowing multiple "preventable medical errors" and continue in business. Each profession has its problem children.
As far as the facts are concerned, there always seem to be two types: the ones people want to see, and the ones they don't since they mitigate positions. Whether judgments are inaccurate or not depend on objectivity, and the closer one is personally tied to the matter, the greater the potential for that judgment to be clouded by subjective reasoning.
Why attorneys want to get into the PI business always fascinated me, as the PIers are hated, insulted, joked about, and villified - until someone gets hurt and everyone turns their back on them later. It's one practice area that I've found not worth the aggravation
As far as "staunchly defend," I see it more as balancing the rhetoric. So far, there has been nothing but condemnation of the legal profession while simultaneous sanctification of the poor suffering physician. And as far as preventable medical errors being,"a multifaceted problem in a complex and high tech system, a little difficult to appreciate when you are not working within it," that's the same song-and-dance given whenever a system refuses to self-correct itself and maintain status quo. Politicians have been doing it for years. Errors/mistakes are noticed, recorded, reviewed, root cause determined, fix formulated and implemented, and results evaluated, and that process works in every other science for failure analysis and correction. When "preventable medical errors" cause fewer deaths than Diabetes and drops one notch to 7th in the "leading causes of deaths in the US," it will be a day of celebration for the public.
There's a lot of education to go around. I've heard a lot about how medical malpractice insurance rates are driving medical professionals into specialties with lower overhead. Yet, the fact that insurance premiums have been rising far out of kilter to claims which have been level for the past six years is treated as insignificant in favor of blaming PI attorneys for everything. Again, the easy target versus who actually is making the money.
Is there concern about rising health care costs? Of course.
Is there effort by everyone which can reduce these costs? Of course.
Will all of the professions "cowboy up" to fix their houses as the first step? We'll see
Is the insurance industry taking a business advantage to all of the hysteria? The numbers speak for themselves.
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I really haven't seen you "balance the rhetoric" in this discussion, much less recognize any of the truths with regard to the physician end of the spectrum.
I am dissapointed but no longer suprised that you really have no interest in learning about both sides of the coin, and seem to have an obvious distaste for the physician perspective (from what I have been able to ascertain). I do wish that someday you would take the time to learn some of the real world goings on in the "day of the life" of healthcare providers. You are sadly out of touch and misinformed with regard to many aspects of it, though dissapointingly it doesn't seem to temper your rhetoric in the least. These are not indictments of you, simply observations.
The sad part is that are are a lot of people that operate under the same misguided perceptions and at times misinformation. There is little hope of improvement for the system as a whole as long as the most vocal pontificators are so unwilling to give both sides of the situation and honest even handed look.
In the end the situation will progress, not for the better, and the circle will continue. People such as yourself that seem to see physicians as the enemy and PI folks as the saviours will just have to wait until less and less numbers of dedicated physicians are able or willing to participate in the present and fututure environment before taking pause and realizing there was indeed truth to be learned from the other side of the coin.
Of course the insurance companies have a great deal of "blame" in the present mess of a system we have...they always have. Once again, one more entity you hold up as responsible while somehow defending your PI folks in a staunch or more oblique way.
I think I have done what I started out to do and offered honest, real world, and well informed information to those that wish to see
both sides of the subject and actually learn something. It is kind of like any gift, you offer it with good intentions and honest convictions and it may or not be accepted, the offering is there either way. I also wanted to offer balance to misinformation and a counter to not only the rhetoric but to some of the flatly wrong postulations that have graced this and other posts, and I have.
To those of you interested in learning and not perpetuating the same behaviors and stereotypes I encourage you to continue your journey, for the rest of you I wish you well.