Science

Doctors and Defensive Medicine

January 17th, 2012

A recent poll suggests the vast majority of Georgia’s doctors are practicing defensive medicine, or ordering unnecessary tests and procedures to keep from being sued.

The poll says 82 percent of physicians have ordered biopsies, x-rays, blood tests, CT scans, and other procedures with little or no clinical value – all in order to protect themselves from malpractice lawsuits

Dr. Jay Siegal of Patients for Fair Compensation says defensive medicine costs Georgians an estimated $14 billion per year and ultimately hurts patient care.

“These are dollars that could be redeployed for a number of more useful purposes including lowering health insurance premiums, said Siegal.

Siegal’s group wants to replace the current medical tort system with something similar to a workers’ compensation board. It would be funded by doctors and health insurers and consist of a panel made up of medical professionals which would evaluate and pay out malpractice claims.

“The goal is to identify what went wrong. If things did go wrong – to figure out how to get the patient compensated in a timely fashion and also to feed back that information into the system to promote patient safety,” said Siegal.

Siegal says it would eliminate the practice of defensive medicine.

But attorney Michael Terry rejects the idea that doctors are being forced to order unnecessary procedures.

“They’re not doing it to avoid liability – they’re doing it because they charge for it,” said Terry. “The idea that someone’s forcing them do unnecessary procedures is absurd when they can be sued for doing those unnecessary procedures.”

Terry says a malpractice system run by doctors would violate a patient’s right to a fair trial.

He compared the idea to Georgia’s short-lived tort reform law, which set a financial cap on jury awards in malpractice cases. That law was struck down by the state Supreme Court in 2010.