Monthly Archives: February 2011

This summer the journal Health Affairs concluded that the costs of medical malpractice lawsuits make up 2.5% of our health care spending. About 0.5% of that was payouts to compensate the victims of medical malpratice; the remainder was the costs of “defensive medicine” practiced by doctors. The article found that the malpractice costs were a [...]

Over at the California Consumer Attorneys blog, J.G. Preston asks a question that every Congressman who supports H.R. 5, the bill to put a $250,000 cap on damages for pain-and-suffering in medical malpractice lawsuits, should be asking: Why are lives lost to medical malpractice not as valuable as other lives? This Wednesday, The New York [...]

A couple of weeks ago, after President Obama’s State of the Union, I blogged about seven ideas to cut the costs of our health care. Ideas that, unlike medical malpractice “reform,” would really make a dent in our health care spending. One of the ideas was promoting the use of medical “hotspotting” – identifying the [...]

A while ago, I blogged about a new Massachusetts database that allows patients to look up all payments that drug and medical device companies have made to their doctors. It’s a nice tool but it’s not very user-friendly. ProPublica has compiled a more limited but more user-friendly database that details the payments that eight drug [...]

Whistleblowing doctor fired – Medpage reports that a cardiologist whose research revealed that a number of cardiologists, including those at her own hospital, were misreading echocardiograms has been fired by her hospital. The researcher, Kiran Sagar, said in an interview, “The cardiologists weren’t happy. I think behind the scenes they were saying, ‘How can you [...]