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 The Reason the Malpractice Problem Exists

Medical care is being destroyed because of malpractice suits.  In Florida, an obstetrician pays two hundred thousand dollars - yes, I said two hundred thousand dollars!  -- each year for malpractice insurance.

The excuse for these runaway malpractice suits is that it is the only way to keep doctors honest. 

Lawyers say that malpractice lawsuits are the only way to punish bad doctors today.

That is true.  Doctors cover up for other doctors, so you can’t convict them in criminal court. 

Medical associations routinely protect bad doctors to a criminal extent.  You cannot find out what your doctor did wrong from a medical association.  The medical associations openly abet criminal doctors who want to hide their past.

So instead of jailing the really awful doctors or exposing them, we use these hideously expensive malpractice suits as our only means of fighting back.  The result is that every doctor pays more malpractice insurance and passes the cost on to us.

Instead of demanding that any physician who covers up for another go to jail, the people have settled for malpractice suits that are making medical costs prohibitive.
 

The Medical Cover-Up is like any other Organized Crime

When J. Edgar Hoover was head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, organized crime was in control of New York City.  Garbage collection cost three times as much as it should have.   Everybody paid for it but nobody dared challenge it.

Everybody in New York knew garbage cost that much because of the Mafia payoff.  J. Edgar Hoover could not deal with the Mafia so he said there was no such thing as the Mafia.

In those days, a New York politician had to get approval from Mafia chief “Lucky” Luciano.  The Mafia ran Las Vegas.

Everybody back then said that no one could do anything about Mafia power.  They were wrong.  A lot has been done about it.  After J. Edgar Hoover’s death, Congress passed the RICO statutes that sent so much of the old Mafia leadership to prison.

You can do something if the people demand it.

But until we start jailing criminals in the medical profession, we will have runaway malpractice suits.  Until we start jailing doctors who cover for criminal doctors, we will have runaway malpractice suits.

 Medicine, Vietnam and the New Organized Crime

Malpractice suits are destroying medicine because we will not jail criminals in the medical profession.  So we take the coward’s way out and the lawyers get rich.

We refuse to deal with the real problem and choose instead to take the coward’s way out. The result of refusing to deal with the hard reality is that what we end up with is the worst of both worlds.

The most obvious example of this was our Vietnam policy.  In Vietnam, we didn’t want to really fight the war but we didn’t want to abandon it, either.  So we got the worst of both worlds.  We fought half a war and lost it.

The longest war America ever fought was in Vietnam, and it was the first war the United States ever lost.

We got the Mafia under control because Americans finally decided to stop lying to ourselves and go after them.

We dealt with the old organized crime, the Mafia, by going after them tooth and tong. 

But we can’t handle the new organized crime, the drug cartels.  The reason we cannot handle the drug cartels is the same reason we can’t deal with medical criminals.  It is the same reason we lost in Vietnam.  We refuse to really go after drugs and dealers but at the same time we refuse to call the war against drugs off.

So we have half a drug war, with the State of California on one side and the Feds on the other.  The Bush Administration wants to make the anti-drug forces happy, but it also wants to make the ACLU happy.

The result is that we have enough drug enforcement to keep the price of drugs high and drug dealing profitable.  But our enforcement doesn’t make the slightest dent in the drug cartels.

Be it Vietnam, drugs or bad medicine, half a war is far, far worse than a real war or an outright surrender.

Going after bad doctors and medical associations will be very, very hard.  But the
present situation is impossible.

 Or Get off the Pot

Most of our worst problems come from our failure to make a decision and stick with it.  Our immigration law is a joke.  We should either treat Mexican invaders as criminals or stop acting like we have a law against illegal immigration.

So, when the Washington sniper Malvo was caught as an illegal alien he was let go. He did most, if not all, of the shooting.  Immigration law is only enforced against legal immigrants.  They are easy to kick around, so the bureaucrats go after them and let outright illegals pour across the border.

Criminals are preying on us because liberal judges let them.  We should clean out the courts, but no conservative dares demand that. 

Instead of going after the judges, conservatives beat their chests and talk about strict enforcement of the law.”  What we end up doing is over-enforcing the silly laws right along with the sane ones.

In the end “strict enforcement” just means you use your resources to persecute legal immigrants rather than concentrating on stopping illegal immigration because that’s too hard to do.   “Strict enforcement” is an excuse to go after the easy targets.

A law should be enforced or it should be repealed.  A war should be never be declared if you do not plan to fight it out.
 

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Issue: Jan. 25, 2003
Editor: Rick Rowland
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