Nursing Home Lawsuits: Are Patients Safer?
Max Kennerly touches on a topic this week that I think is interesting and important. To what extent are plaintiffs' nursing home lawyers making nursing homes safer?
People hunker down in one of two camps: (1) nursing home lawyers are saving our elderly from being unmercifully abused; or (2) nursing home lawsuits drain so much money from nursing homes that they can't provide quality service at a meaningful price. As the poets say, the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle and these binary choices don't do justice to the complexities of the issue.
Anyway, the blog post was precipitated by an article in The New England Journal of Medicine on the impact of nursing home lawsuits on nursing homes. The NEJM recently took a lot of heat from doctors for arguing that medical malpractice tort reform is not helping to reduce costs or improve patient care. On nursing home lawsuits, however, the journal goes in a somewhat different direction, concluding that lawsuits are not making nursing homes safer and that being a "good" nursing home does not provide much insulation from litigation. I'm oversimplifying a complex study but that is the gist of it.
Max writes a good post that lays out some of the issues. He draws an interesting conclusion that if he (and I) were correct that nursing home lawsuits do make nursing homes safer, then it is a pretty sad commentary on how we as a society treat our elderly.
The only part I disagree with in the post is the punctuation. Max puts the NEJM article researchers in quotation marks (as in "researchers"). These guys got their article published in the New England Journal of Medicine. I don't agree with their conclusions because I think it is impossible to measure all of the crosswinds that make up the impact of nursing home lawsuits on the quality of nursing home care. And, certainly, the funding for the study is absolutely fair game. But the lead author of the study, David Studdert, is a credible researcher at Harvard. Studdert has also established his "reasonable on this general topic" bona fides with me by concluding in a study five years ago that our legal system is not riddled with frivolous malpractice claims and that malpractice caps are not meaningfully lowering doctor's malpractice insurance premiums. So I will give them "researchers" without the quotes, even if I disagree with the findings.
