Want to Reduce Malpractice Costs? Reduce Malpractice

Every day, American newspapers and other news media crank out a new supply of editorials calling for tort reform. Every day, there are new accusations that millions of dollars are wasted by “frivolous” lawsuits filed by “greedy” litigants and predatory lawyers. These so-called “greedy” litigants include people suffering from mesothelioma and other deadly diseases caused by asbestos exposure.

You can pretty much count on the words “frivolous” and “greedy” appearing at least once in every editorial. A new rhetorical twist that has been popping up lately is likening personal injury lawyers to drug dealers. It’s as if all these editorialists are writing from the same set of notes.

Oddly, it’s hard to find a similar number of fire-and-brimstone editorials raging against malpractice. Yet a 2006 study by the Institute of Medicine showed that medication errors alone injure 1.5 million people and cost billions of dollars every year. Why aren’t we seeing as much outrage about “sloppy” doctors and pharmacists?

Often doctors are duped by “duplicitous” pharmaceutical companies into prescribing dangerous drugs that patients don’t really need. In recent years about 13,000 people have sued Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, claiming that drugs taken to relieve symptoms of menopause caused breast cancer and other problems. Wyeth manufactures the hormone replacement drugs Premarin and Prempro, which in 2001 earned the company almost $2 billion in sales.

Many physicians were persuaded to prescribe Premarin and Prempro because articles favorable to the drugs were published in medical journals. But it turns out that Wyeth was paying ghostwriters to plant the articles in the journals. Respected physicians often were paid to put their names on the articles even though they didn’t write them.

The articles claimed the drugs not only relieved menopause symptoms but also provided some protection from other effects of aging, such as dementia and heart disease. So for a while American physicians routinely prescribed these drugs for their patients experiencing menopause.

But it turns out that the drugs actually increase the risk of dementia and heart disease as well as breast cancer. And litigants’ attorneys have discovered that Wyeth was aware of studies conducted in the 1970s that linked Premarin to endometrial cancer and studies in the 1990s that linked Prempro to breast cancer. But the public, and most physicians, were unaware of these studies.

Finally, in 2002 a major clinical trial was halted when the researchers realized that women taking the hormone replacement therapies had a higher rate of breast cancer, heart disease, stroke, and blood clots in the lungs compared to women taking placebos. After that, sales of menopause drugs plummeted. But for many women the damage was already done.

Recently a jury in Pennsylvania ordered Wyeth to pay $75 million in punitive damages to a woman who took Prempro and developed breast cancer. According to “tort reformers,” such awards are bad for the economy and increase health care costs, and must be stopped.

But what remedy do they recommend? “Tort reformers” say the law should protect Wyeth from having to pay damages to the women who developed breast cancer and other problems. In other words, their remedy is not to find ways to prevent reckless practices that injure and kill people, but to protect companies like Wyeth from liability. In what universe does that make sense?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.