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Politics : High Tolerance Plasticity -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kodiak_bull who wrote (21896)	10/17/2004 4:34:10 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Respond to of 23153

Kodiak, you're joking, right? Your state: Funny, all you have to do is open up the yellow pages in any medium sized town (say 70,000 and up) and look up Attorneys and for certain you will find medical malpractice attorneys advertising for clients. You seem to be making the point that your yellow pages "research" undermines my assertion. But I don't see why. Naturally there are a few attorneys who advertise for medical malpractice cases. They are looking for solid, large damages cases that justify the expenditure of their time and money. What does that have to do with my statement that: If you ever become the victim of medical malpractice you will soon learn the utter folly of [the] statement [that 'anyone can file a malpractice lawsuit.']. One of the hardest things to find is any attorney willing to take on a medical malpractice case. It requires great skill, a huge ability to finance the case, a willingness to face a well-oiled defense machine with huge deep pockets and a rabidly aggressive defense posture, and the guts of a riverboat gambler. ...The bottom line is that any attorney who files such cases frivolously as a matter of course will soon find himself broke." What I wrote is clearly true; for the many liability malpractice cases where the liability is not clear cut, or the many medium damages malpractice instances, it will be virtually impossible to find an attorney willing to take on the cost, time and effort to prosecute the case. If you move from the "not clear cut" liability cases to the "frivolous" cases, you'll need to find a fool for an attorney and you'll need to find him before he goes broke. It's not an impossible task but it is an extremely difficult one. You can look up and quote more attorney ads if you want, you can make up more fictional numbers to justify your theory that it could be profitable, and you can ignore the reality if you wish, but you'll still be wrong. (Take a look at the number of unsubstantiated "ifs" that you pose for critical facts and you'll see how thin your made-up hypothesis is.) The fact remains that med mal cases are expensive to prosecute and that it is almost impossible to bully highly specialized defense and insurance interests into paying frivolous settlements. Remember that their doctor and hospital clients are more versed on the "malpractice" aspects of the case than they are, and that such clients have the right to reject settlements of frivolous cases. Remember too that the parties and their attorneys know which plaintiff's attorneys are too incompetent to successfully handle such complicated medical/legal cases. So if it is "all about the money," then a logical look at the "money" reveals that the "frivolous med mal" case justification for exploding malpractice insurance costs is a house of cards.