Okay, so I have to comment also. Let me ask a question. Why do we always complain about how much doctors make when we have no problem paying a lawyer by time for work? Do you know how much doctors pay to have an education. Most owe somewhere from 150,000 up to 300,000 in debt. Overhead is so high that many doctors are quitting because they cannot pay to stay in business. Yes, doctors do make a good salary, but I also sacrifice a significant portion of their lives going to undergraduate, medical school and then residency before they can even practice medicine. It really irritates me when we always blame the doctors. I will tell you something. If there were not so many people wanting to file lawsuits in this country, doctors could actually use their training and knowledge to make decisions instead of ordering unneeded tests to cover. It is out of hand. Malpractice is out the roof. Also, to those who want socialized medicine. I would look into it further if I were you. I know several people from Canada that hate the system there and bought private insurance to get care. If doctors get paid a standard salary, then there will be no incentive to see more patients and a lot less will go into the profession and alot will get out. So, that means a much longer wait time and no more getting into the doctor quickly for common complaints. An example, you can wait up to a year to get an MRI for a shoulder injury with socialized medicine.
Doctor's charge at a much higher hourly rate then lawyers do. Further, if the person has insurance, the doc gets paid whether or not the patient CAN pay the rate. An attorney has to deal with making sure the client actually DOES pay (we don't get to bill insurance companies to cover our fees usually) Further, many legal plans who will pay fees, pay at such a low rate its even worse then what docs get paid. I have several cases with legal plans that what they are paying doesn't even cover 15% of the time spent on the case.
As for the cost of legal training versus medical training. Hate to break it to you but law school isn't cheap either. Further, many medical students (at least all the ones I knew) moonlighted during their residencies and had the vast majority of their med school loans paid off before they went into real practice (or maybe its just the docs that I know). Heck, one of my friends not only paid off his medical school loans during his surgical residency through moonlighting, but also put his wife through med school.
As for unneeded medical tests... hold on there. Doctor's play percentages, just like insurance companies do. They don't run a test because the likelihood of you having something is too low or because you don't fit the dx criteria perfectly.
I can flat out tell you that I have had 3 doctor's commit malpractice regarding my care and 1 with my hubby's. I haven't sued a single one yet (though I did write a nasty letter to the hospital that the doc in the er screwed up badly) and never planned to.
The biggest problem in ANY service related field is controlling client expectations. Malpractice insurance for doctors is MUCH higher then for attorney's because in general if an attorney screws up, their client may be out time and money. A doc screws up and the client may be dead.
If you have a client that walks in and expects you to solve all their problems and you can't, they will NOT be happy with that outcome, especially if you lead them to beleive that you WILL solve all the problems. Docs are human too and make mistakes.
Finally, medical malpractice cases are VERY EXPENSIVE to litigate on both sides. Lawyers weed out a vast majority of these cases (normally I tell 99% of them to file a complaint with the med board) because
a) there is no harm and therefore no case .. a good example of this is when the doc prescribes a medication incorrectly, but the error is caught before any medication is taken... thus no harm no foul (one of my dh's dentist did this, so frustrated and upset about a tooth pulling gone bad she prescribed him tylonel 3 and he's allergic to codine, of course DH caught it before he got the prescription)
b) the cause of the issue is unclear or not provable. you have to be able to prove that the doc did (or didn't do) something that led to causing the harm. The fact that a doc didn't run some random test that the person had no signs or symptoms for is not usually going to hold up in court
c) its hard to find an expert to testify for medical malpractice -- IE docs don't like testifying against docs
On the other hand, I also find that medical malpractice insurers are quick to settle even if the case has a low chance of winning in front of a jury due to the fact that the litigation is just so expensive.
BTW, I do live in a state with medical tort reform and guess what, the tort reform effects less then 5% of medical malpractice cases and the cases it does effect are those where the person is either dead or severely disabled. Which means that the care of the person is shifted from the negligent (and I use this because tort reform ONLY comes into play AFTER a legal finding that the doc is at fault) doctor to our state/federal medicaid/medicare system. The studies done have shown that the average award has not changed from pre to post reform.
My wellness visit 2 years ago- one test didn't go in as routine care when billed, so wasn't covered at 100%. Had to have the doctor resubmit. This year DH had his wellness visit, all his routine lab work was not entered as routine (which is 100%) and instead our spending acct was charged for the deductible, had to get that resubmitted. Back in Sept my flexible spending account paid my Chiro, they never applied the payment and sent me a bill. I think I now have a credit there! Now if we found those few things by searching our claims on Aetna's website, imagine what we would find if we had itemized bills and EoB's!
