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Medical Malpractice
Fear Factor: Medical Malpractice
Legal reforms have brightened the medical malpractice horizon, but physicians are still wary of lawsuits -- and still angry at high insurance premiums. More than 2,000 now choose to go without insurance.
Battle of the waivers
 RISK MANAGEMENT: Dr. Robert W. Yelverton runs the 67-physician Tampa Bay Women's Care. The group's insurer recommended that doctors have their patients sign arbitration agreements waiving their right to a jury trial. "This is what we have to do to have affordable insurance," he says. [Photo: Mark Wemple] |
Dr. Robert W. Yelverton, a retired obstetrician-gynecologist who runs Tampa Bay Women's Care, defends the waiver requirement, saying he has to do everything he can to minimize the chances that the 67 physicians who work for him will end up in court. Yelverton says he is still scarred by the one lawsuit he experienced during his 30-year career in medicine. Even though he eventually won the case, "I can't tell you how miserable I was for four years." He says he has never quite looked at his patients the same way, cautiously assessing their behavior for clues as to how likely they may be to sue him.
With malpractice premiums for OB/GYNs costing more than $100,000 a year for about $1 million in coverage, requiring waivers "is what we have to do to have affordable insurance," says Yelverton. "This is a more legitimate way to deal with medical-malpractice claims." Patients who refuse to sign, he says, will have to find a new doctor.
The Florida Medical Association, meanwhile, is encouraging its physician members to get patients to sign a waiver agreeing to limit non-economic damages in the event of a lawsuit to $250,000 -- the amount that tort reform advocates wanted the Legislature to enact. Whether such agreements will withstand judicial scrutiny remains to be seen, but FPIC has said it will help doctors enforce the agreements.
 WAIVER ADVICE : Orlando lawyer Scott McMillen says he'd advise patients presented with waivers from their physicians to run out the door. [Photo: Gregg Matthews] |
Not surprisingly, Florida trial lawyers are aghast. Orlando lawyer Scott McMillen says he'd advise any patient presented with such a request to run for the door. Steven C. Marks, an attorney with the Miami-based law firm Podhurst Orseck, calls the idea "offensive. What a sad state of healthcare, and what does that say about the people coming out of our medical schools today? Those doctors ought to be ashamed of themselves."
Arbitration programs are common out West, however. In California, CAP-MPT, a popular insurance company, requires all OB/GYNs and neurosurgeons it insures to offer arbitration agreements to patients. In Utah, the widespread use of arbitration agreements by doctors in risk-prone specialties like neurosurgery and OB/GYN over the past several years has helped stabilize malpractice premiums, the Utah Medical Association says.
And, of course, the trial attorneys have their own waivers, routinely asking clients to waive their rights to the limits on contingency fees imposed by Amendment 3. FMA even plans to use the Florida Supreme Court ruling that approved the attorneys' waiver as a model for the waiver it wants physicians to get from their patients.
