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Something I've thought about before, and which Pirate asked about on the way to the school bus stop this morning. Most states these days have mandatory seat-belt laws for everyone. Here in New Hampshire, seat belt use is recommended for everyone, but still mandatory for children (up to age 18, actually). You can be cited and fined for not having a seat belt on your child.
So how come school buses don't have seat belts?
On a slightly different subject, NPR reported on the way back from the bus stop that medical insurers in New Hampshire are considering not paying hospitals to treat conditions caused by medical errors.
Sure makes sense to me... if I'm a mechanic, and I'm working on your car, and I fuck something up that was fine when you brought the car in, you should expect it to get fixed on my dime, not yours. Why should a hospital be any different?
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Unless hospitals are ORDERED (or bullied, by lawsuits) to fix problems stemming from medical errors, I suspect plenty of people will die. Fixing medical errors is really, really expensive, after all, and hospitals are businesses.
That said I have no sympathy for the medical insurers here. They're defining a new, very amorphous category of things they won't cover -- just like they always do, because it helps *their* bottom line.
Why do we let companies determine our health, again?
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(Which, of course, does come under bully them to do it, I suppose.)
That aside, though, come on, surely the public goodwill of being known as a hospital that accepts responsibility for fixing its own medical errors counts for a lot more, in the long run, than the cost of fixing them. If the cost of correcting its mistakes is more than the value of that goodwill, it's probably not a hospital you want to risk going to anyway.
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Goodwill only matters when consumers have a real choice. And few people are going to drive 60+ miles to the next hospital for routine care -- but it's that fairly routine care that causes a lot of deaths (catheter -> infection -> hospitalization -> more infection -> dead).
I wish I had a solution.
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This is just them saying they won't pay---which means leaving the patient doubly injured, because it means the patient has to pay and then not be able to afford to sue and eat the costs. (Dr. Bob injures me. I go to Dr. Jane, who has no connections at all to Dr. Bob, to get it fixed. Insurance says Dr. Jane's bill is my problem and that if I don't like it, I have to go sue Dr. Bob.)
Your insurer breached contract and didn't pay for an injury of yours for which he was clearly liable. Why was he confident he could get away with that? He bet, correctly, you couldn't afford to sue.
So where it's not an emergency, you (insurer) send the patient to somebody other than the docs/facilities who did it to fix it, and then you bill the docs who caused it for the costs.
This is just using the "Oh, yeah, that sounds right" response of people hearing about it to do the unconscionable---dump the costs of patients injured by doctors squarely onto the patient.
My auto insurer, when I get in a wreck and it's the other guy's fault, pays to get my car fixed and then goes after the other guy's insurer, or the other guy himself, for the money. My insurer has the muscle to demand the other guy's insurer (or the other guy himself, if he has money and is uninsured on purpose) pay up. I don't.
In said wreck, if I had to go straight to the other guy's insurer, myself, to get my car fixed or my injuries paid for, I'd die of old age before I'd see a penny.
Same as your own loss: "You can't afford to sue me. Fuck off, peasant."