Medical Malpractice in Your State

limiting patients' rights does not improve care or lower insurance rates

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Minnesota

According to the American Medical Association, Minnesota is showing "problem signs," and on its way to becoming a "crisis" state.

Reality Check:

• The number of doctors has gone up, and
• the median compensation victims receive has gone down.
  

Minnesota does not cap damages.

The Truth About Minnesota: "Minnesota hospitals are now [admitting mistakes to patients] publicly and privately, experts said. For a long time, confessing medical mistakes was considered professional suicide. Now, the trend at some hospitals is to disclose mistakes to patients and families as soon as they happen." ("Medical Errors: Laying it on the line," Associated Press, 1/24/05)

In the case of Nancy Fox, her doctor apologized, talked to her husband separately, and the hospital convened a meeting of everyone involved to review what went wrong.

In Minnesota, where medical errors are taken seriously and patient safety tops the agenda, victims' rights are still fully protected and there were almost 600 more doctors in 2003 than in 2002.

Medical Malpractice & Preventable Errors

Patient Safety Should Come First

Instead of limiting patients' rights, Congress should look to preventing insurance companies from price-gouging doctors and help implement processes that will put patient safety first. Fixing the system to put patient safety first will ultimately bring down costs for everyone.

Nationally, medical errors are a real concern with USA Today reporting that medical errors seriously injure 1 in 10 hospitalized patients.

In fact, the Institute of Medicine reported as early as 1999 that medical errors are a national crisis. Yet, those same researchers recently noted that despite 5 years of calls to action, the medical community has made little progress in reducing the risk to patients who use the healthcare system. In particular, researcher Lucian Leape thinks that the medical community "has deflected attention from saving patients to saving money." read more..

Number of Personal Injury Lawsuits

There is no litigation explosion. The National Center for State Courts Recently reported that:

• Tort filings have declined by 5% since 1993. Contract filings, meanwhile, which are more likely to involve businesses than tort cases, rose by 21% over the same period.¹
  
  
• Automobile tort filings, which make up the majority of all tort claims, have fallen by 5% by 1993 and 14% since their high in 1996.¹
  
  
• Medical malpractice filings per 100,000 population have fallen 1% since 1998.²
  
  
• In 22 of the 30 states that NCSC examined population-adjusted tort findings declined from 1992 to 2001. The average change in tort filings across all 30 states was a 15% decrease.¹
  

Sources:

1. Examining the Work of State Courts, 2003, National Center for State Courts (NCSC) 2004
2. Medical Malpractice Filings per 100,000 Population in 11 and 17 States, 1993-2002, National Center for State Courts, 2004 (unpublished, on file with author)

Updated September 2005