Brain Damage Newsroom

They Won The Lawsuit, But Millions Of Dollars Were Spent On That Litigation

No group of doctors in America has the hammer falling harder on them than the doctors who deliver our babies. They are getting hit with extraordinary increases. They are getting sued to an extraordinary degree. We need to do something about it. We have bills here, and whatever the bill is, they say ``we need to do something, but this isn't the way to do it; but we want to do something.'' They say ``there are problems, I will admit, Senator, but this isn't the right bill.'' They say ``you have not done this or that,'' and on and on. The result of that is we never pass anything. I believe it is time to do something about this issue. We can do something about this.

When you look at the cost of delivering babies in America today, the liability cost is a very significant portion of it. Not only that, doctors--particularly those who have been practicing for a number of years--do not like the agony of going through a lawsuit. There is the combination of premiums and the threat of being dragged through court for long periods of time, and that is not good. That is why they are quitting.

I was at one of the hospitals in Gadsden this week. One of the nurse supervisors came up to me after I had been asked in the meeting whether we were going to do anything about the liability problem. She said she and the hospital had been in litigation. She had been away from the hospital for 10 days during the trial of this case. They were not negligent and they won the lawsuit, but millions of dollars were spent on that litigation. This is happening all over America. Most of the cases are defendants' verdicts, but many cases are coming in with extraordinarily high verdicts. The BMW case out of Alabama, decided by the Supreme Court, raised real questions about how do you decide what punitive damages ought to be. Does the jury just feel bad this day or look at the victim and feel sympathetic, or are they more sympathetic to one person than another? They come up with $50 million for one person, and maybe in a similar situation they would come up with $500,000. These are aberrational verdicts in the country.

We are saying that there should be a limit for compensating noneconomic damages. It is modeled on a successful program in California. I believe we are facing a national crisis in health care. It is a crisis that ought to be confronted. It is not going to go away. A big part of it is litigation. If you don't believe it, ask any doctor or hospital you know. They sue everybody, including the nurses, doctors, the aides, the hospital, the manufacturer of the hospital bed, or whatever, that might be possibly construed as being connected. All of that adds up to a tremendous burden, a tremendous cost on our health care system.

The truth is health care costs are continuing to go up. One of the factors is litigation costs, which are going up even faster than other costs. We need to contain that and bring some rationality into it. I am willing to listen to other ideas. I am not sure California is perfect, but I will say it is working there. I believe it will work for our country. I thank our majority leader, Dr. BILL FRIST, for bringing this up. It is time to debate this. We need to pass something soon to protect the availability of health care. We need to make sure hospitals and doctors are not quitting delivering babies. That hurts us in America and hurts health care in America.