The Easiest Way For The United States To Spend Less On Medical Malpractice

There’s been considerable talk regarding medical malpractice tort reform in Texas and what laws we could create in order to keep the costs of medical malpractice lawsuits down. Lawmakers have spoken about putting caps on non-economic damages and punitive damages or making emergency room doctors immune to many med mal lawsuits – and other changes that would help doctors and hospitals but hurt patients and medical malpractice victims.

Here’s another solution to consider: we can significantly cut to cost of medical malpractice litigation by making steps to reduce medical malpractice in our doctors’ offices and hospitals. We could do more research to determine how to prevent the most common types of medical malpractice, like surgical errors and medication mistakes. We could get negligent doctors out of hospitals before they harm multiple patients. We could invest in new technology that would reduce the number of medical errors.

Sometimes it seems like we are extremely critical of the process of getting justice for medical malpractice victims, while forgetting that we should perhaps focus our attention on preventing these tragedies from happening in the first place. Did you know that we don’t even have a clear idea of how many patients die in hospitals each year because of medical errors? Or that many medical errors, such as intubation errors, could be irradiated or significantly reduced with a few simply changes? 

Perhaps we should focus on stopping medical errors from ever happening rather than focusing entirely on the aftermath.