Miss Wilke is an advertising writer.
Any legal system that awards material compensation for the incidents and accidents of "outrageous fortune" produces an outrageous society.
The practice of medicine is in a legal bind that is costing countless lives and creating untold misery. While bureaucratic blockages continue in the Food and Drug Administration, some people find it necessary to leave the country for the medicines they need to stay alive. In hospitals across the country, the simplest procedures to avoid pain and complications are prohibitively delayed to accommodate procedures necessary to protect doctors against possible lawsuits. The red tape takes time and time can be a killer.
A number of things have contributed to this situation.
For one thing, in this welfare world, people are psychologically attuned to believing nothing should go wrong — and if it does, they should be paid for it. If they lose their jobs for any reason, doesn’t their employer have to pay compensation? Of course — even if they’re fired for incompetence or simply quit out of discontent.
In recent news stories, a woman brought suit for $130,000 for not being hired as a volunteer fireman. Another person is bringing a million dollar suit against the city for an auto accident in which a family member was killed. A bus company is being sued for a mugging that took place on its property. And a frostbitten hiker rescued from a mountain top in a winter storm is suing the rescuers for not reaching him faster.
Generally speaking, every time a person makes a welfare claim he also is bringing suit for food, shelter, wages or other benefits. He sues his friends, neighbors, everyone for his misfortune. It’s certainly no more absurd to fix responsibility for ill health and accident than for unemployment or insufficient income.
While it is astonishing that people will "bite the hand that feeds them," it is so well established in the prevalent hostility toward enterprise and industry that we shouldn’t be shocked when people also slap the hand that helps them medically.
The attitude that nothing should go wrong in life and all reverses should be materially compensated is carefully cultivated by the false assurances of our omnipresent government controls. Supposedly when government controls everything, everything is supposed to be all right. Actually, it only prevents anything from going right when it diverges from its peacekeeping function.
Certainly progress has been slowed by the findings, delays, reversals, uncertainties, new findings and political machinations of the FDA. But the FDA is not bad because it’s slow, confused or wrong. It’s bad because it exists. There’s simply no way it can ever be right.
Across-the-board medical decisions are impossible to make. The vast physiological differences in people make it a certainty that what is right for one person will be wrong for another.
Individual error is a fact of life — something we all have to live with. But error that becomes institutionalized through government controls is something we shouldn’t have to tolerate. We shouldn’t give power to other people’s mistakes.
Controls Have Consequences
By the sheer threat of its implacable presence, the government has stifled advances in medicine, not allowing the free market to work its wonders.
For one thing, the FDA holds that anything is harmful if it is harmful in large quantities. If universally applied, that would certainly make everything harmful. As a political body, however, the FDA is characteristically selective in its applications.
Its rulings never apply to city governments that continue to pour fluoride into our drinking water although it causes pitting in the teeth of adults and is poisonous in large quantities. Youngsters’ fluoride needs are more safely provided by the market in toothpaste products.
Meanwhile, milk advertising is attacked on the basis that milk is not good for everyone — such as those with an allergy to it.
Medicines are assailed for having "ineffective ingredients," whereas Mary Poppins and every good marketing person knows it takes "a little bit of sugar to make the medicine go down."
How to Stop Progress
If consistently applied, government "protection" could wipe out all the medical advances since the discovery of anesthesia. And incidentally, anesthesia is harmful to some, and to anyone in large quantities. While bureaucrats fuss over their decisions, people are suffering and dying.
How could two bureaucrats ever agree anyway? Doctors and scientists don’t agree among themselves in many cases. And of course there’s nothing that couldn’t be harmful to someone, somewhere, under some circumstances.
While that elusive one-in-a-million person is protected in one way (harmed in others) by government action, hundreds and thousands are denied the benefits of needed ministrations.
The government also fosters a false sense of security’ through licensing. And here again, government controls keep unavailable the services which could be helpful to many people.
In spite of the frequent benefits of acupuncture, for example, try to find a practitioner in your telephone book. If we are protected from these helpful people, the standards of acceptance for licensing must be exceedingly high, right? Wrong.
A spokesman for the AMA recently stated that "the inept must be ferreted out of the organization." Then what could be clearer than the fact that licensing has not performed any safeguarding function.
Secrecy Maintained
The government and the AMA have built secrecy around the medical profession that shouldn’t exist. This cliquishness is reminiscent of the awesome aura and sacrosanct position of the medicine man in primitive tribes. His monopoly had the approval of the chief. Today’s doctors and medicines have the approval of the government. And that’s about all we know about them.
In many cases, people go to a doctor with nothing more than the chance recommendation of a friend or acquaintance. They know very little about him. It was different when people lived in the same town all their lives. But in our mobile society, newcomers have no information on which to base a decision. In fact, it’s not allowed.
Any doctor who makes news with some exciting ideas or treatments is in danger of losing his position. It’s something of a crime for a doctor to get publicity. It’s unethical. It’s awful! But why?
When you choose a doctor you could be making a life and death decision. Certainly you should have as much information as possible on which to base your decision. This is someone you should want to know quite a bit about.
Let the Facts Be Known
I believe it is unethical for doctors not to get publicity and I think advertising by doctors would be very helpful. With information available, you could make your decision on the basis of the doctor’s background, his experience, any approach he uses that is different from others in his field, and so on. And you’d also know who else is available and their backgrounds. To me, this is a lot safer than getting a recommendation from a hairdresser or picking a name that sounds nice out of the yellow pages.
After choosing the doctor you think you can put the most faith in and soliciting his aid, it would be nothing but barbarian to bring charges against him, even in the case of error. The only basis for a legal case against a doctor should be misrepresentation as to his background, education or experience.
Public information about doctors, more than anything else, would act as a safeguard. Public declarations have to be truthful. They’re legally assailable, but basically they’re truthful in order to fulfill their function. Falsehood makes its way in politics, but in the market place it’s quickly discovered.
As for medicines, the personal opinion of a doctor in the case of an individual patient is obviously safer than the judgment of a bureaucrat thousands of miles away trying to determine what’s right for crowds of numbers averaged into statistical lumps.
Government controls standardize mistakes, disrupt efficiency, delay progress and prolong suffering. And they are generally demoralizing.
At a time when we need more, not fewer doctors, malpractice suits and insurance costs are adding to the disruption of the medical field already suffering government manipulation through inflation, welfare programs, education practices and limited entry.
Legal suits and insurance requirements are discouraging people from becoming doctors and driving others out of practice… threatening the future of all medical care. Some doctors are avoiding specializations where risks are high, such as brain surgery. Others are relocating geographically to areas where insurance is less costly.
Only a free market in medicine’ can get the health field back in the pink. Without government blockages, there would be more doctors, more levels of practice, more levels of prices, more general care available, more discovery and progress.
Would there be more negligence in hospitals without the threat of malpractice? On the contrary, it is that costly threat that is now paralyzing medical practice, extending risks, delaying action and costing lives.
In summary, malpractice should be included among the other government controls such as the FDA and licensing, which are curtailing medical activity and threatening the nation’s health. Malpractice suits are a psychological spin-off of the welfare system where misfortunes are not to occur without compensation. These suits are costly to everyone, not only in dollars but in pain.
There should be no legal basis for any malpractice suit against a doctor because:
1) All life is uncertain and human error is a fact of life;
2) Patients are physiologically different, making medical practice unpredictable;
3) Qualified doctors will differ and vary in recommended procedures, each acting in his own best judgment;
4) Those seeking a doctor’s services voluntarily must know they are taking a necessary risk. Any medical treatment is risky. If they don’t want to take that risk, let them cure themselves. Or sue themselves.
As things stand, doctors are regarded as more than human — and everyone else less than human. Doctors should be regarded as human and capable of error. And patients should act more human by bearing the responsibility for their decisions. Information should be available on which to base those decisions.
Actually, it’s a wonder no one has sued a doctor for bringing him into this risky old world in the first place. That is the underlying basis for every compensatory claim. It is a complaint against life itself. We are born into an uncertain world. There is nothing certain about a job, or an operation — or walking down the street.
Shakespeare wrapped the whole issue up in that tidy phrase, "to be or not to be." It is a question that few in history have had the opportunity to ask themselves as we in America have. We answer it affirmatively whenever we act responsibly on our own.
We can only be by making our own informed decisions freely in an open market and then honoring those decisions in our relationships with each other.