Health Beat’s Maggie Mahar offers a well-documented take on medical malpractice issues, including some startling facts from a recent article from the New England Journal of Medicine written by the Harvard School of Public Health:

• “The great majority of patients who sustain a medical injury as a result of negligence do not sue.” Indeed, the New York Times reports, although “recent studies have found that one of every 100 hospital patients suffers negligent treatment, and that as many as 98,000 die each year as a result . . .  only a small fraction of injured patients — perhaps 2 percent—press legal claims.)
     
• “Just 1.1 percent of all doctors accounted for 30 percent of all malpractice payments made between 1990 and 2002, while only 5.2 percent of doctors were responsible for 55 percent of all payouts.”  A very small group of doctors are losing or settling malpractice lawsuits, but they are losing big.
     
• “Eighty percent of claims involved injuries that caused significant or major disability (39 percent and 15 percent, respectively) or death (26 percent).”

You can catch more on medical malpractice at Total Injury’s main site.

While advances in genetic testing have allowed people to get a better picture of their health by catching and treating health conditions sooner rather than later, it also comes as no surprise that insurance companies have used genetic testing as a means to deny coverage to people with preexisting conditions. Thanks to legislation which recently passed the U.S. Senate, health care discrimination based on genetic testing would be banned, leaving insurance companies to find another way to save a buck at the expense of the public’s health:

● Congressional Bill Prevents Health Care Discrimination based on Genetic Testing.