COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

Yep. I thought I heard everything. Until now.

According to ABC News, one Dr. Chris J. Hawk introduced a motion asking the AMA to endorse refusing medical treatment to lawyers involved in medical malpractice suits.

The motion didn't pass.

Although now we know how easily Dr. Hawk is willing to sell out his medical ethics for money.

The article also mentions a woman who was refused treatment by a plastic surgeon because, of all things, her father--a Mississippi legislator--opposed liability limits in malpractice suits.

The surgeon says he saw a conflict of interest.

I'm calling bullshit, there, too.

Our medics and surgeons in Iraq go to work every day, treating Iraqis--in many cases wounded, injured, and sick detainees who were trying to kill our troops.

Our medical personnel don't get to refuse care to enemy wounded and claim "conflict of interest." Our medical personnel work hard to treat the man in front of them. Period.

It's the only ethical thing to do.

This surgeon's "ethics," on the other hand, are the ethics of a monster.

(This kind of pedantic legalism in the name of "ethics" is one reason I don't particularly trust journalism's code of "professional ethics" to center a story when everyone on the staff shares lefty assumptions and a liberal world view, either.)

Now, I'm going to commit a heresy, here:

The sky-high medical malpractice premiums are not the lawyers' fault.

Sure, they contribute to costs, but we've always had malpractice suits. And we've always had lawyers. And personal injury attorneys wouldn't be so much of a problem if doctors and their own lawyers were better at convincing juries.

So it ain't the personal injury lawyers. Rather, I think we need to scapegoat some swarthy little brown-skinned people. Specifically, we need to scapegoat Al Qaeda.

That's right--one of the biggest reasons that doctors' medical malpractice premiums have skyrocketed over the last few years is Al Qaeda.

How can this be? Aren't medical malpractice insurance premiums set totally separately and independently from workman's comp claims from fire and earthquake costs to life insurance to property and casualty insurance to errors and ommissions to annuity insurance programs? Aren't doctors in a totally different risk pool?

No.

The fact is, all insurance underwriters, themselves believers in the concept of spreading the risk, purchase reinsurance. And the World Trade Center attacks were the biggest insurance event in modern history.

And the reinsurers took the hit.

What the doctors are seeing--and blaming, wrongly, on the lawyers--is the aftereffect of the WTC attack and the overall heightened awareness of catastrophic risk on the part of the reinsurance market.

9/11 sucked the reinsurance pools to dangerously low levels. And in order to restore reinsurance reserves to reasonable levels--and even higher levels than before, given the perception of risk in a world with Al Qaeda--reinsurors have cracked down on underwriters by raising their reinsurance premiums and limiting their coverage. And the underwriters have no choice but to raise their own premiums to stay in the medmal market, or abandon the market to those insurance underwriters who can.

The situation was compounded by a general decline in equities during the same period. Which meant that the investments constituting the float--the investments the insurance companies make with the premium money when they aren't paying claims--were plummeting at the very moment the insurance companies saw the huge 9/11 spike in claims.

Which drained the insurance and reinsurance pools even more.

And so, after years of easy insurance (and spoiled doctors!), 9/11 ushered in an era of hard insurance, with tighter policies, and higher premiums.

And between 9/11/01 and 2003, we saw this across all lines of business. Not just medical malpractice. Many professionals saw errors and omissions insurance premiums increase by 40% or even 100% or more in that period of time.

Of course, that's not going to stop the scapegoating. But if you're gonna scapegoat, you might as well scapegoat the right people.

And this time, it ain't the lawyers.

In fact, lawyers have to pay errors and omission claims, too.

Which means we're all in the same boat.

Well, except for the terrorists, that is.

Splash, out

Jason