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Jul 05, 2008

House Bill 152: Sad but Necessary

A recent article by Roger Alford from the Associated Press presented a tragic scenario for Kentucky citizens that live in the rural areas of our state.

According to the article, the lack of facilities for treating severe trauma in Kentucky is costing lives. Since the state only has three centers that are capable of treating traumatic injuries, surviving such an injury is increasingly becoming a matter of geography.

Dr. William Barnes, a trauma surgeon in Western Kentucky, is quoted as saying that people critically injured in rural areas are 50 percent more likely to die than those injured in urban areas with major hospitals. While most hospitals have emergency rooms, this does not mean that they have the facilities, equipment or medical specialists that are capable of providing adequate care for patients that have suffered from traumatic injuries.

Victims of traumatic injuries in rural areas of the state are often first taken to the local hospital, and then shuttled by ambulance or helicopter to the nearest trauma center. This is a time consuming effort in a situation where time is critical.

Currently, Kentucky has no standard system of communication that allows first responders to know what trauma facilities are best suited to treat the injured, or which of those facilities are available and ready to receive patients. Paramedics often have to find this information themselves, often while driving and trying to stabilize the victims under their care.

State Representative Mary Lou Marzian (D-Louisville) recently drafted House Bill 152, which requires the state to create the Kentucky Office of Trauma Care. Its purpose would be to provide first responders with instant information so they will know immediately where to take their critically injured patients.

Although it is unclear where Rep. Marzian intends to get the funding for this office, its establishment would be an important first step in improving our survival rate for people suffering from traumatic injuries.

While Ms. Marzian should be applauded for initiating this response system, there are some questions that should be asked: Why does the entire state of Kentucky have only three facilities capable of handling traumatic injuries? Why are so many of our rural citizens losing their lives because there are no decent treatment facilities available in their area?

The answer, as quoted by the article, is disturbing.

"Trauma centers see large numbers of uninsured patients and face high malpractice insurance premiums. That, Marzian said, discourages them from operating full-scale trauma centers.”

In other words, the lives of our critically injured citizens are placed in further jeopardy because HMO’s and hospital chains feel that it isn’t cost effective to provide them with adequate facilities.

A few years ago, the “medical malpractice crisis” was featured prominently in the news. The premise of the “crisis” was that many doctors were unable to continue practicing medicine due to skyrocketing malpractice premiums. The insurance companies very conveniently claimed that, because of a flood of “frivolous lawsuits” and “record verdicts,” the only way that they could continue to provide coverage and stay solvent as businesses was to raise their rates to astronomical levels.

The numbers do not back up their claims.

According to the National Center for State Courts, a research group funded by state courts, personal injury and other tort filings, when controlled for population growth, have declined nationally by 8 percent since the 1975, and have been falling steadily in real numbers since 1996. The numbers are even more dramatic in places with rapid population growth, like Texas, where the rate of tort filings fell 37 percent between 1990 and 2000. Even in California, the rate of filings has plummeted 45 percent over the past decade.

The claim of “record verdicts” doesn’t add up either. In 2001, juries voted against plaintiffs in 75 percent of all medical malpractice trials, according to the federal government's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). The median award for plaintiffs that actually won was $425,000. That’s hardly a record amount, and the numbers haven’t gone up in subsequent years.

Insurance companies are crying poverty in the midst of consecutive years of record profits. They raise their rates not to keep their business ventures solvent, but to improve their profit margins. Insurers routinely raise their rates to astronomical levels whenever they find themselves in a situation where they might actually have to expend their money to settle claims. In more extreme cases they simply issue blanket denials of claims, or refuse to offer policies to areas that they deem “too risky.” Evidence of this practice greets us on the front pages of our newspapers.

USA Today, 2/16/07: JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood said Friday that he will seek legislation aimed at blocking State Farm Insurance from refusing to write new homeowners and commercial policies in the hurricane-battered state.He said the plan is modeled after actions by Florida and would require any company that writes automobile insurance in Mississippi to also write homeowners policies.

State Farm, Mississippi's largest home insurer, said Wednesday that it has had enough of Mississippi's "untenable" legal and political climate and would not write new homeowners and commercial policies in a state still struggling to recover from Hurricane Katrina.

The hard lesson that many of our fellow Americans learned after Hurricane Katrina is that insurance companies are not there to help. Citizens of Kentucky are unfortunately learning the same lesson, as citizens that aren’t fortunate enough to live near one of our three trauma centers stand a much higher chance of dying. And the only reason this pathetic state of affairs exists is because providing decent facilities for our injured is financially “untenable” for insurance companies. We would like to say that we find this behavior shocking, but unfortunately we have been dealing with insurance company tactics for far too long.

At the Law Offices of Daryl Dixon, we have spent years fighting for decent treatment for our clients. For most of our cases, this means bringing the fight to insurance companies that have placed their profit margins over the needs of their policyholders. This means providing legal counsel for those that have suffered from a brain injury and can’t get the necessary funds for treatment or rehabilitation. It means fighting an insurance company that isn’t even offering enough money to handle the medical bills of someone that suffered from an injury. It means taking a full inventory of what our clients lives were like before the injury, and what they truly lost as the result of someone else’s negligence.

If you or a loved one has suffered from an injury, and you feel that your needs are not being taken seriously by an insurance company, contact our offices for a free case assessment today.

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