Letters to the Editor
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Obama's record on medical malpractice
Last night, I read an excerpt from an Atlantic article which upset me quite a lot. But first, the back story:
In 2005, several weeks before Katrina hit, my husband underwent emergency surgery in a small town in northern IL and came within hours of dying from horribly botched colon surgery (which may well have been unnecessary). Though a surgeon at UW Hospital in Madison WI thankfully subsequently saved his life through a series of ghastly surgeries stretching over five months, my husband ended up with chronic health problems. When we returned New Orleans in mid-January '06, he had to take early retirement from his job as a New Orleans firefighter after 26 years, in the process losing a huge part of his pension. We then had to move out of New Orleans, having lost three-quarters of our income.
The IL surgeon and hospital (which it turns out had a notorious reputation) were horribly inept and I wanted them stopped, so I tried hard to find a plaintiff attorney to take his case. Though plaintiffs need to meet only one and we met all five criteria for medical malpractice in IL, I could find only one attorney who would even talk to us. Though the attorney admitted ours was pretty much a slam dunk, he eventually declined because of considerable up-front costs, which we couldn't afford.
Two and a half years down the road, my husband just recently had what will hopefully be his last major surgery stemming from this ungodly mess.
Would you like to know who has helped put untold numbers of Illinois medical malpractice plaintiffs in this bind? Read the following, please:
"LIMITING NON-ECONOMIC DAMAGES:
These seemingly unusual votes wherein Obama aligns himself with Republican Party interests aren't new. While in the Illinois Senate, Obama voted to limit the recovery that victims of medical malpractice could obtain through the courts. Capping non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases means a victim cannot fully recover for pain and suffering or for punitive damages. Moreover, it ignored that courts were already empowered to adjust awards when appropriate, and that the Illinois Supreme Court had previously ruled such limits on tort reform violated the state constitution.
In the US Senate, Obama continued interfering with patients' full recovery for tortious conduct. He was a sponsor of the National Medical Error Disclosure and Compensation Act of 2005. The bill requires hospitals to disclose errors to patients and has a mechanism whereby disclosure, coupled with apologies, is rewarded by limiting patients' economic recovery. Rather than simply mandating disclosure, Obama's solution is to trade what should be mandated for something that should never be given away: namely, full recovery for the injured patient."