As a culture, America has decided that at least in health care the vast amount of negligence committed by physicians should not be considered "crime." Doctors are not to be considered "criminals" for the injuries they cause. The percentage of the accidents that is in fact due to simple negligence, as opposed to criminal negligence is unknown.
But if, as a people, we have decided to indemnify physicians, what about the Victims? We have a chaotic, fragmented "system" that, at theoretically, should supply money to the injured to both cushion their economic damage and provide some consolation. In practice, what we have as a system of compensation is a sort of ‘medical malpractice casino’. Lawyers take cases, not on merit, but on how much money they will receive. They hide under the fiction, with no basis in fact, that the tort law serves is a deterrent to other physicians.
We have a state board system that can only sanction physicians. It does not compensate medical victims. In many instances, boards have actually ‘covered up’ cases. This has occurred, no doubt, to decrease the rate of prosecution of these cases in the civil courts and thereby limit the number of malpractice awards.
From the point of view of the culture, physicians are to be indemnified for their actions, from the point of view of the Victims, even simple ‘negligence’ is experienced as a ‘crime’ once it is discovered. Try to tell an individual, whose life is tragically and permanently altered by a missed diagnosis, a failed procedure, or a surgical mistake, that she or he is not a victim of a crime.
Our culture has denied most Victims both justice and compensation. It is a situation that has been described as "Justice Denied".
The survivors of malpractice must fight to receive compensation. As our case has highlighted, this is a tortuous process that leads the survivors drained. On average, these cases wend their way through the civil court system over a 5-year period. There is no doubt a well thought out rational behind this. By stringing these cases out, the Victims are drained emotionally. When the legal process is completed, the injured and/or the family are all to happy to settle – most often with a promise to never again talk publicly about what happened to them.
Since only 1 in 8 cases ever reach the legal system, the most harmed patients have neither justice nor money in the end. And, as a culture, we have permitted this. The interested reader should pause for a moment and think again of "Dasein Ohne Leben". In the error of our approach to medical malpractice, we have fallen into a dangerous similarity to the pattern of thought of National Socialism. That is, the