California Brain Damage Lawyers

Verdict Was Rendered Because Of A 5-Year-Old With Cerebral Palsy After A Mishandled Birth; $25 Million In San Diego County

Under California law, these are some of the verdicts that have been rendered to compensate families for children who were born with serious disabilities: In December, an $84 million verdict was rendered because of a 5-year-old with cerebral palsy after a mishandled birth; $25 million in San Diego County because a boy had severe brain damage; $27 million in San Bernardino for a woman who was a quadriplegic because of failure to diagnose a spinal injury; $21 million in Los Angeles for a newborn girl with cerebral palsy and mental retardation as a result of a birth-related injury. They go on.

These are real recoveries to compensate people for economic losses they will have in the future and to allow them every possibility to see that the child or the person who is injured can be taken care of with the best conditions we can make. We are concerned about the explosion of punitive damages. Some people say the person who did wrong ought to be punished.

As a matter that we need to think about, the system is out of whack. The person who commits malpractice is not the one who is punished. The person who commits malpractice--for the most part, hopefully, certainly, all of them doctors--has insurance. They don't pay the verdict. The insurance company pays the verdict. How do they get the $21 million or whatever they have to pay out in the verdict? How do they get that money to compensate the victims? They raise the rates on everybody; the innocent and those who commit errors. It is driving up the cost to practice.

I have a wonderful friend, an OB/GYN, in my hometown of Mobile. We go to church together. He was telling me about a doctor that just gave up his practice. He handled 60 or 80 births a year. His insurance was $60,000 a year. That is almost $1,000 per birth. This week, I was in a hospital in Alabama. They told me 3 years ago they gave up deliveries--there were 200 deliveries a year in this small town, and the hospital had less than 50 beds--because they could not afford the insurance. The hospital quit doing it. The physician in the community also quit delivering. This is a fact, a reality, and it is driving good physicians out of health care.

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.

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