Most of Dr. Goldman's ideas are good, but putting caps on compensation to injured patients isn't a good idea.  Caps limit the ability of injured patients to receive compensation for their injuries (inherently including compensation for the medical costs as well as pain and suffering), and caps do nothing to solve the real problem, which is malpractice itself.

Rather than compensation caps for their patients, physicians need to act to reduce malpractice in the first place.

National Practitioner Data Bank data shows that in most states only about two percent of physicians have been responsible for over half of all the money paid out for malpractice since 1990.  NPDB data also shows that quite often these two percent have multiple payments in their records but no action by state licensing boards to revoke their licenses or restrict their practices.  Similarly, most often no action has been taken by hospital peer reviewers to revoke or restrict their clinical privileges.  So the "repeat offenders" continue commit more malpractice.

To have true malpractice reform the licensing boards and peer reviewers need to get serious about protecting the public from physicians with a pattern of malpractice.  

It is also worth noting that there are fewer than 20,000 malpractice payments each year for all causes although the Institute of Medicine estimates that there are about 100,000 deaths each year from malpractice.  Other sources double that number.   Only about 28 percent of malpractice payments involve patient death.  Thus we can estimate that at most only about 3 to 6 percent of all malpractice victims receive any malpractice payment.  

The real problem isn't malpractice payments.  To save money -- and more importantly, to save lives and prevent injury -- we need true malpractice reform that reduces malpractice itself.  We need to stop treating the symptoms -- malpractice payments -- and instead treat the disease -- malpractice.

  -- Robert Oshel, Ph.D.