A disease in the house of medicine.
For good reason the costs and casualties of medical malpractice have really earned the often overused sobriquet of "crisis." Invariably the debaters assert that the public's interest is best served by their program and their exchanges are not merely rhetorical, given the intense legislative activity on the "reforms" aggressively pushed in most of the nation's state capitals. The question of what is in the best interest of the public traverses a minefield of competing interests. The plaintiff's lawyer bias of Mr. Petty's article moved us to follow up with a brief commentary which raises some other criticisms. As a metaphor for many health policy issues, the tensions around malpractice will receive continuing attention in these pages.
D003695:Delivery of Health Care / Q000191:economics*; D007351:Insurance, Liability / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence*; D008318:Malpractice; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D014481:United States