Every medical error is the fault of the lawyer. These cannot be addressed without the fear of litigation. So, the majority are covered up. Try dealing with the drunken surgeon without betting the hospital, when he sues.

The express goals of torts are in utter failure. The implicit goal of torts is a raging success, lawyer rent seeking. It is a bunko operation in its entirety. Its destructive effect on the economy is massive, knocking off a point off growth that would have been compounded into eternity.

This assumes all plaintiffs are making such war, which they are not. Some percentage of consumer lawsuits are justified and have merit, and you propose broadbrushing those plaintiffs, as well. If someone has filed an action with merit, the good guy service provider has nothing to fear from them.

Dr.: He’s in the database, so I refuse to treat him.

patient’s wife: He’s in the database because another doctor had six martinis before cutting him open, and removed a kidney instead of his appendix. If you’re sober, what are you afraid of?

“pitiless adversary”

“those attacking our American way of life.”

Wow, forget to take your meds today?

Waivers are against public policy. One cannot sign away the right to make a lawyer rich.

http://www.lmnc.org/pdfs/waivers.pdf

I’m sorry. It has to be back to the Stone Age for those attacking our American way of life.

The good guy lawyers have nothing to fear here.

A plaintiff is at the cash register. The credit card is good. Name is on a plaintiff database. The store declines the purchase, and has him escorted off the premises, banning him.

The same pre-checking is done by a heating service, called when the boiler is broken on a zero degree day. Then, refuse to come out.

If someone is making war on our economy, there is no duty to service the pitiless adversary.

[Kip replies: Or you could just make him sign a waiver.]

In a civil case the burden of proof is preponderance, i.e. 50.1%. Thus with an ever so slight favor for the plaintiff goes the full spoils. Thus if the defendant is 50.1% in the right, he is free of blame. The scales of justice are not preloaded to tip one way or the other, and whichever way they do tip is the jury’s finding of fact.

In criminal trials the burden of proof has a substantial skew to the scales, with beyond a reasonable doubt as the requirement. Thus, though the prosecution might fail to meet the reasonable doubt standard, there could be easily a strong appearance of guilt, anywhere from the preponderance (more than likely guilty) all the way up to but not including reasonable doubt (pretty damn sure of the guilt, just not sure beyond all reasonable doubts).
Thus the finding of not guilty would not equate to innocent because of the unequal burden of proof in criminal trials.

The NPD is not a database that the public can search to avoid taking their business to a “bad doctor.” In fact, much of the information in the NPD – the identity of physicians in particular – is not available to the public.

The litipages.com database grants no such privilege to patients. And, of course it wouldn’t. It’s intended to serve a completely different purpose.

I’m particularly intrigued by this phrase of nevins’s:

“merit invalidated by a jury finding against the plaintiff”

What if we applied that same logic to criminal cases? Acquittals would represent false arrests and malicious prosecutions? That hardly seems like a reasonable way of thinking. But then again, I’m no lawyer.

The presumption in the Physician National Practitioner databank is that all cases, jury finding and settlement without finding or admission or wrongdoing even are included in the database. Since toss-ups are included on the defendant side, it would only be reasonable to include the same toss-ups on the plaintiffs database as well. After all, if the legal system never rendered judgment for either party, then why should the reporting of the data presume to guess which party to assign blame. So the only cases not to report in the Patient Databank would be those in which a jury finding went against the defendant.