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Should Texas Be The Model For Medical Malpractice Reform?

brooks — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:52:26 +0000

In the last few months, opponents of health care reform have insisted that one key to lowering health care costs is the adoption of “tort reform” by capping the damages that can be recovered in medical malpractice cases.

For some time now, I’ve been urging people to look at the Texas medical malpractice ”experiment” to see if those claims were right. In 2003, the Texas legislature re-wrote Texas medical malpractice laws and put in place some of the most restrictive caps in the country. And where has it gotten us?

I’ve argued in the past that the Texas experiment proves that damage caps don’t help people. For instance, since the caps were put in place, the cost of health care has increased for Texas consumers. Similarly, Texans were promised that tort reform would significantly increase the number of doctors in areas of the state that traditionally have trouble finding medical care. By and large, that hasn’t occurred.

Now, a new study by Public Citizen not only helps prove my arguments, but shows that the results are even worse than I imagined. Have health care costs gone down since the adoption of Texas’s tort reform laws? No. In fact, the contrary has occurred. Since 2004, per patient Medicare spending (one of the best indicators of health care costs) has risen in Texas at nearly twice the national average. Similarly, tort reform supporters argue that doctors continually run unnecessary tests because they are scared of being sued. But the data shows that the increase in testing expenses in Texas has grown at a much higher rate than the national average.

Surely health insurance premiums for Texas consumers have been getting better since “tort reform”? Wrong again. Texas premiums have increased 144 percent for families since the adoption of tort reform. And that increase is just about at the national average.

Maybe medical malpractice caps haven’t decreased costs, but the reforms must be allowing new doctors to come to Texas, right? Yes and no. The number of doctors has increased since 2003. But that’s misleading. The growth in number of physicians per capita has increased at a much lower rate than we were growing prior to “tort reform.” Similarly, there is little, if any, difference in the number of doctors in the rural parts of area — the areas that really need doctors. In rural areas, the number of direct care physicians per capita is almost identical to what it was in 2003. And by and large, areas that were without various specialists are still without those specialists.

So what are we getting for “tort reform”? As a Dallas news-reporter noted:

So did Texans benefit from “tort reform”?

Doctors, some.

Insurance companies? A lot.

Most Texans probably couldn’t say.

But if you lost your baby after a difficult delivery, tort reform may have taken away your ability to find answers.

We now have over five years of data showing that medical malpractice caps don’t produce the promised benefits. The government shouldn’t take the mistakes that we’ve made in Texas and implement them all over the country.

Does Austin Have A Street Racing Problem?

brooks — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:58:12 +0000

This weekend, one family (including three young kids) lost their mother and another family lost their mother/grandmother because of illegal street racing. Fifty-three year old Maria Gaona De Corona and twenty-eight year old Adriana orales-Catalan were innocently sitting at a bus stop when nineteen year old Erick Armando Nuncio-Moreno blasted towards them, possibly at speeds up to 90 miles per hour, and slammed into them and their stop. Witnesses have reported that Nuncio-Moreno was engaging in street racing at the time.

This is not the first time innocent Austinites have been victim of this careless conduct. Almost two years ago to the day, I wrote another blog post about the increasing number of car wrecks Austin was experiencing due to street racing. Later that year, the Austin Police Department announced that they were going to enforce a crack-down on street racing.

And two years before that, another 19 year old was among two people arrested when their street racing resulted in two deaths.

Are these incidents isolated, or is there a real problem? I’d like to stick my head in the sand and say it’s not a real issue, but in stumbling across an Austin street racing video, I think the problem is larger than many of us would like to admit. Even more troubling to me, reading the comments to the video, the readers are posting popular locations for street racing even as late as late 2009, and many of those locations are the same places identified by police back in 2006 as most popular street racing sites.

I just hope that the APD can get a handle on this problem and put a stop to these needless deaths and injuries.

Federal Judges Under Investigation

sbrennan — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:59:16 +0000

I don’t have time to really comment on it, but Lise Olsen of the Houston Chronicle has a story in today’s paper about the surprising number of federal judges under investigation. Led by Texas’s own Judge Kent, the story reads like a soap opera — we’ve got allegations involving nude photos, escort services, and accepting cash from lawyers.

To contact Austin Personal Injury Lawyer, Austin Personal Attorney, Austin Accident Lawyer, Austin Injury Lawyer Perlmutter & Schuelke, LLP or to learn more about Austin Personal Injury visit http://www.civtrial.com/.

My Thoughts On Ike

sbrennan — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:08:50 +0000

Forgive me as I go a bit off topic.

As trial lawyers, we’re taught that it’s important to tell your story to the jury. Stories are powerful.

Most of us in Texas have spent the last few days watching the news. I mean, I had lunch at a sports bar Friday, and most of the TVs were tuned into the Weather Channel. The local and national news stations have done an okay job of explaining the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, but I have been extremely impressed by the coverage of the Houston Chronicle. The Chronicle has embraced the internet and new media to really provide the stories behind Hurricane Ike — not only stories from its own reporters, but stories, blog posts, videos and photos submitted from readers. Those are the real stories from Ike. I urge everyone to take a few minutes and read or watch some of those stories, particularly those from Galveston, which was probably hit hardest by the storm.

And then consider the stories we haven’t heard. Consider those in Haiti or Cuba or some of the other Caribbean countries that don’t have the opportunity to tell their stories. Because we concentrate on the stories of the US, we don’t get the same coverage or same stories from these countries. And then consider where these stories began. Compared to the lifestyles of most here in the US, these people started in a hole, and I have a hard time imagining how they find the hope and optimism to keep on going, especially after being hit by not one, but four large storms in a row. But somehow they do, and because their stories don’t get out to us, they often do it without the amount of aid or help that our Texas gulf coast residents can expect.

How are we doing? I’ve received some emails from attorneys out there just checking in. Austin is only 2 ½ hours from Houston, but with Hurricane Ike, it was a world apart. While Galveston and Houston were being decimated Saturday, Austin experienced blue skies and 90+ degree temperatures. The positive thing about that is that Austin has been able to take in refugees fleeing the coast. And they keep coming. I understand that busloads of coastal residents will be arriving in Austin and San Antonio today and the rest of the week while their home areas try to recover.

Blawg Review #125

sbrennan — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 20:09:27 +0000

Kevin O’Keefe has posted Blawg Review #125. We haven’t posted links to these in the past, but Kevin’s issue has some great information on blogging, and it appears he put a LOT of work into it.

Review # 123 was hosted by Austin’s own Texas Appellate Law Blog.