There is no empirical evidence to support the much-publicized notion
that the tort system amounts to a lottery for injured plaintiffs, as
President Bush and others have long maintained. If anything, the
system appears to be biased against victims of medical malpractice.
Research has confirmed that juries in medical malpractice cases tend to sympathize with the
doctors being sued rather than the patients who are suing them, says Philip G. Peters Jr., a law professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia, after analyzing three decades of research on the subject. His research is published in the May edition of the Michigan Law Review.
Prof. Peters found that doctors win about half of the cases that independent experts
who review them believe should result in a plaintiff's victory. Only about 27 percent of medical malpractice cases are ever heard before a jury, the lowest percentage in any category of tort litigation.
The reasons believed to account for this bias in favor of physician
defendants include:
- the doctors' superior
economic resources and social standing;
- jurors' willingness to give a
doctor the benefit of the doubt in cases in which the evidence is
confusing or complicated; and
- cultural prohibitions against seeming to
profit from injury.
This research confirms that there is no "epidemic" of frivolous malpractice cases and
"runaway" jury verdicts that many elected officials claim are forcing doctors
out of practice and leaving patients without needed medical care. Political rhetoric and fear mongering do not make something true, no matter how much the politicians may want them to.
Source: "That Malpractice 'Epidemic'?" by Sandra G. Boodman, published in the Washington Post.
