Physician Negligence Claims and Legal Reforms

27 Dec Physician Negligence Claims and Legal Reforms

One of the most consistent parts of the debate over the cost of healthcare has to do with the cost of medical malpractice insurance. Insurance companies and doctors, in some cases, claim that the threat of being sued causes them to raise their rates and that capping the amount of damages that a person can receive due to a medical malpractice claim is a way to remedy the skyrocketing costs of healthcare. Attempts to change the law to accommodate this have been tried in Texas and other states. Results have not panned out the way advocates claimed they would, in most cases.

What Attorneys Do

A medical negligence lawyer, contrary to some of the media and political press, is not a specialist in frivolous lawsuits. Many of the people who are injured by negligent doctors end up having to pay extremely high medical costs as a result of those injuries and end up losing time at work, causing them to suffer even more financially. A medical malpractice attorney works with these clients to make certain that they don't face the costs of a doctor's negligence on their own. If you think that doctors and insurance companies are well-meaning victims in all of this, consider how much money they have on hand to pay for their own legal defense and to insure themselves against their own incompetence.

A good medical negligence lawyer will take a look at the specifics of your situation and let you know whether or not you actually were a victim of medical negligence in their view. This doesn't mean that a jury will automatically agree with your lawyer and award you money, of course, but it's the first step in filing a lawsuit. If the attorney doesn't believe that medical negligence was a factor in your case, they won't take your claim for a very simple reason.

Good attorneys who represent people who have been the victims of medical negligence generally work on contingency agreements. This means they don't get paid a dime unless they actually win the claim. If the jury believes that the medical negligence suit that they are pleading is frivolous and fails to award any money, the attorney simply forfeits their legal fees. Attorneys are not getting rich by taking ridiculous cases. What medical negligence attorneys do is represent people who have been wronged by a physician or a healthcare facility and who need someone to help them recover damages.