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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Curing the State’s Malpractice Law

Here’s a quick quiz: Name the top three causes of death in the U.S. Heart disease and cancer are No.1 and No. 2. But I suspect No. 3 will stump you. The third leading cause of U.S. deaths is preventable medical errors. You read that right. The health care system we expect to cure all too often kills. Each year, 440,000 Americans die from preventable medical errors. It’s like two jumbo jets falling from the sky every day. Given the death toll, one would expect the medical establishment and government to move heaven and earth to stem the wanton tragedy. Instead, it goes on quietly, mostly unnoticed, largely unimpeded. Sacramento and Washington lawmakers fiddle. The medical industry mostly turns a blind eye. The Troy and Alana Pack Patient Safety Act, which is on the Nov. 4 statewide ballot, offers a three-dose cure for what ails California health care. It will prove a lifesaver as well as a money-saver for business and the government. This ballot measure requires random drug and alcohol testing of doctors, just like pilots, police and other public-safety professions. Nearly one in five doctors will suffer substance abuse problems during their careers. Would you want a doctor with a hangover to operate on your kid? The initiative also curbs the reckless prescribing of narcotics, a good step given that deaths due to pharmaceutical abuse have outpaced traffic accidents. To thwart such abuse, the initiative mandates that doctors use an existing state database I helped develop. Right now, only 6 percent use it. In addition, the measure will modernize our state’s malpractice law to account for more than 39 years of inflation. Right now, it caps the value of a child’s life at just $250,000. The loss of my own children a decade ago sent me down this road to reform health care in our state. Troy was 10, Alana just 7. They were walking to a neighborhood ice cream store in Danville with my wife, pregnant with twins. They never had a chance when a car driven by a woman high on prescription narcotics mixed with alcohol plowed into them. My kids were killed. My wife survived, but we lost the twins. The driver of the car had been doctor-shopping, scoring hundreds of Vicodin recklessly prescribed by six doctors at the same hospital chain. I tried to get the hospital to adopt safeguards, but they gave me the cold shoulder. When I tried to take them to court, I was told my kids’ were worth $250,000 because of the state’s malpractice law. It has capped “pain and suffering” damages – the only sort one can seek in a tragedy like ours – at that level since 1975, even as everything else has soared with inflation. Before the accident, I was an executive at the Internet firm AOL and helped launch NetZero. In the decade since, I’ve spent much of my time seeking to reform our health care system. I’ve pushed and prodded lawmakers, too often to no avail. It’s tough for me to accept the rhetoric masquerading as truth coming from the medical and malpractice insurance industries, our foes in this initiative fight. Several of their claims were repeated May 19 in these pages by the Valley Industry and Commerce Association. The Pack Act will not boost health care costs – it almost certainly will keep a lid on them. Its three cures will have a deterrence effect, saving lives. Fewer patients harmed by medical errors mean fewer lawsuits, lower malpractice insurance costs and. for business, a big drop in lost worker productivity. Governments, meanwhile, will reap significant savings in Medi-Cal drug costs as doctors take greater care in prescribing. Doctor-shopping addicts will be derailed. The savings to state and local government could rise to more than $400 million. Community clinics serving the poor aren’t even part of the equation in medical malpractice. Federally funded clinics are protected and indemnified from malpractice by the U.S. government under the Federal Tort Claims Act. And finally, the initiative maintains the existing restrictive limits on attorney fees in malpractice cases. Even so, lawyers are not the Public Enemy No. 1 the medical industry makes them out to be. I’m glad lawyers are there to fight for families like mine who have been devastated by medical negligence and then stonewalled by hospitals and doctors when we seek answers and accountability. In November, we can accept a status quo of far too many impaired doctors, far too much reckless prescribing and far too many patients killed or maimed by hospital errors. Or we can seek sensible change that will save lives and money. As a father and businessman, to me the choice seems clear. Bob Pack, a resident of Danville, is the proponent of the Troy and Alana Pack Patient Safety Act.

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