The patients of Maine have a problem: threatened access to quality, afford able healthcare.
We are a coalition of three Maine health care associations collaborating to protect the public’s access to quality care and to restrain the inflation of health care cost. We hope to accomplish what many other states have already done by reforming liability laws so that your physician remains in Maine and the best new doctors continue to come here to practice. Victims of negligence deserve compensation and it not our intention to deny these patients their rights. But the liability system must be restructured to be fare to all.
The Maine Medical Association, the Maine Osteopathic Association and the Maine Hospital Association are working together to protect the public’s access to quality health care. Our coalition is seeking to advance medical liability reform to preserve access to physician services, improve the affordability of health care and ensure high quality care in Maine.
Across the country, America’s patients are losing access to care because the nation’s out-of-control legal system is forcing physicians in some areas of the country to retire early, relocate or give up performing high-risk medical procedures. There are now 21 states in a full-blown medical liability crisis -- up from 12 in 2002. In crisis states, patients continue to lose access to care. In some states, obstetricians and rural family physicians no longer deliver babies. Meanwhile, high-risk specialists no longer provide trauma care or perform complicated surgical procedures.
A recent national study confirmed that 40% of medical liability lawsuits are with either no verifiable medical injuries or errors. The costs of these meritless lawsuits are borne by patients who have less access to care as physicians are forced to spend significant time and money defending themselves against meritless lawsuits. Of the cases that go to trial, physicians are found not negligent 83 percent of the time, but defense costs average more than $90,000 and time away from patient care. As the study points out, 'the overhead costs of malpractice litigation are exorbitant.'
Medical liability insurance premiums are sky high, forcing physicians to change the way they practice medicine and hurting patients' access to care. In Miami, premiums for general surgeons increased on average 20 percent per year from 2000-2005, and ob-gyns in Philadelphia saw increases of 30 percent on average per year. The human cost of the crisis is found in the real stories of pregnant women forced to drive long distances for obstetrical care and bright young physicians opting out of the practice of medicine because they can not afford medical liability insurance.
There are also real costs to the medical liability crisis. Every American pays for the broken medical liability system, which adds $70 to $126 billion dollars to the cost of health care each year.