Medical Mistakes???
Shoot the bastards!

The very idea of medical malpractice lawsuits has always mystified me. No... it has angered me.

There's a joke floating around the Internet about a heart surgeon who owned a motorcycle. One day he took his bike into a garage. A mechanic said, "Doc... you and I do the same kind of work. You get into a person's heart and repair a problem. I do the same thing with motorcycles. I get into a bike's heart, it's engine, and repair a problem. Why should you get paid more than I?"
The surgeon replied, "Try doing it with the engine running."

For me, this "more truth than fiction" story perfectly describes the difference between a medical professionals job, and the job of folks like me, who fix things when the "engine" is not running.

Do medical doctors make mistakes? Are they human? Everyone makes mistakes. I have made some whoppers. Once I made a direct response TV commercial for a client in Philadelphia. I will always believe that I did it well. But when we made a tape of the commercial to send to a TV station, someone transposed the figures on the 800 response number that appeared on the commercial. The commercial aired several times on a Philadelphia TV station, but no calls came to our 800 number. In a panic, I called the TV station and asked that someone view the tape and tell me the 800 number they saw. The mistake was discovered. Any viewer who may have responded to our commercial would have called a wrong number... perhaps hearing a message that the number they dialed was "no longer in service."

I paid for that mistake. I was not paid for my work. I had to pay the TV station's charges for airing the commercial, and I lost the client. But I was not sued! Should I have paid the client for the loss of time in getting his advertising campaign underway? Perhaps. Should I have paid one lawyer a big paycheck for dragging me into court and paid another a fee for keeping me out of jail? Well, I didn't have to.

But, if I had been a medical doctor, I well may have had to pay the client tens of thousands of dollars, and paid the lawyers many more thousands.

There are some crazy things accepted as "the way it is done" in America. None are crazier than medical malpractice lawsuits. Do doctors sometimes become careless and negligent? It is possible. But, should the "harmed" patient receive a huge payday, vastly greater than his actual losses? Should all other patients contribute to that big payday and simultaneously make a trial lawyer wealthy? Like it or not, that is what is happening. and we are paying twice because doctors are then forced to practice "defensive medicine".

Okay... maybe defensive medicine is a necessary step in protecting us. But should insurance company profits and obscene legal fees also be piled on?

We all know that the government fails miserably when it comes to running things. Be it the postal service, Social Security, Amtrak, even Cars for Clunkers. The reason they fail is because decisions are made for political reasons: To gain votes. To shift the blame. To make an opponent look bad or make a friend look good, or, as in the case of trial lawyers, to make a payback for earlier support.

Maybe it will take an uprising of the population. Maybe a new, powerful leader will emerge to do the job. But if this government of, by and for the people is to survive, the job of running things must be forever taken out of the hands of politicians.