Today’s Health Care Check-Up: — January 5, 2000
Following are excerpts from an op-ed about the "right" to sue HMOs that appeared in Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times:
"Suing HMOs Won’t Improve Care:
Litigation Doesn’t Get the Right People to Deliver the Right Treatment at the Right Time and Place"
"[A]n unstructured, unconditional ‘right’ to sue could set off a tidal wave of litigation against deep-pocket health plans that would scare off both the employers who pay for care and the practitioners who provide it.
The ostensible reason for suing health plans for mismanagement is to promote better care. … But research documents huge gaps between the care people should get and what they actually do get. Overservice, underservice and wrong service persist no matter the type of provider or health plan.
Last month, the National Academy of Sciences pegged the annual toll of avoidable deaths at up to 98,000. Clearly, 50 years of lawsuits against doctors and hospitals haven’t made medicine as safe, effective or efficient as it should be."
—Randall Bovbjerg, lawyer and health care researcher for the Urban Institute, "Suing HMOs Won’t Improve Care: Litigation Doesn’t Get the Right People to Deliver the Right Treatment at the Right Time and Place," Los Angeles Times, 1/4/00
Is Congress more interested in passing a "Patients’ Bill of Rights"
or a "Lawyer’s Right to Bill"?
