• 29
  • June
    2011

Many claim the current health care crisis of rising costs and too few providers is fueled by medical malpractice lawsuits and multi-million dollar verdicts. But as health care costs continue to skyrocket, the number of payments for medical malpractice claims actually continue a 7-year decline.

In 2010 only 10,195 payments were made on claims of doctors' medical mistakes. The amount of money paid on claims has reached its lowest number since 1998, according to a study by Public Citizen.

"Health care costs have nothing to do with what's going on in the courtroom," stated Public Citizen's Congress Watch Division Director, David Akrush.

Public Citizen analyzed data from the National Practitioner Data Bank and found that the 2010 payments represented only a fraction of medical costs across the United States. In fact, they represented about one percent of the costs for Medicare patients.

Public Citizen's analysis also unearthed several important points, including:

  • Between 2000 and 2010, health care spending nearly doubled while medical malpractice payments fell 11.9 percent;
  • Malpractice payments in 2010 amounted to just 0.13 of 1 percent of national health costs; and
  • Total costs for malpractice litigation fell in 2009 to just 0.40 of 1 percent of health costs.

Medical malpractice encompasses preventable adverse events, such as operating on the wrong location, a foreign object left in a patient after surgery, in-hospital falls or burns and infection that can result is serious lifelong injuries or death. Hundreds of thousands of medical mistakes are reported annually.

As the data shows, blaming the victims of medical malpractice for the problems of the health care industry will do little to solve them.

Source: Malpractice Payments Plummeted in 2010: New Data Show Health Care Costs Are Not Linked to Lawsuits