Stroke Victim Challenges Georgia ER Malpractice Laws
Emergency room doctors make decisions quickly as a matter of life and death, often without knowing the medical history of their patients. That was the argument the Georgia Supreme Court justices heard this week defending a 2005 tort reform law. It requires the injured to make a clear and convincing case that an emergency room doctor committed “gross negligence” to prove medical malpractice.
The case in question involved a woman who had serious pain behind her eye. The woman went to St. Francis Hospital in Columbus in April 2007 with a throbbing pain. Instead of a CAT scan, the doctor blamed her headache on stress and high blood pressure, gave her a prescription for Valium and sent her home. The woman was reportedly screaming in pain. Turns out she suffered a brain aneurysm. A CAT scan would have found it. Her lawsuit blames her stroke, permanent paralysis and neurological damage that followed on the doctor’s failure to treat her with a reasonable standard of care.
The Georgia state legislature passed a tort reform law in 2005 to keep doctors from leaving the state for fear of malpractice lawsuits. In doing so, the lawmakers carved out an exception for hospitals, practically eliminating medical negligence claims. Many people who are truly injured have found that they have no recourse and a major insurer of physicians reports that medical malpractice claims have fallen. That is nothing to brag about.
The Georgia Supreme Court is also listening to a challenge to the state’s damage cap in medical malpractice lawsuits. In that case, a 75-year-old woman argued that a $350,000 cap on non-economic damages, such as pain and suffering, is unconstitutional and denies her right to a trial by jury.
This particular woman had plastic surgery that left her disfigured and a lower court had allowed the malpractice damage cap to be set aside. A jury awarded her more than $1 million in non-economic damages, and the realtor had lost her ability to deal with the public. Her attorneys argue that the tort reform law comes between plaintiffs and their right to a trial by jury.
When tort reform eviscerates our Constitutional rights we need to challenge it. It’s too bad that those already damaged and injured must carry the torch for the rest of us. Consumer push backs are also occurring in Indiana and Maryland. Let’s pray that the Georgia high court does the right thing.
Source article: http://www.ajc.com/news/tort-reform-challenged-over-156324.html?cxtype=rss_news_128746
