This week, President Bush urged Congress to limit the damages that patients can collect for medical malpractice, because doctors "should be focusing on fighting illnesses, not on fighting lawsuits."

That's true, but the counterargument is that doctors should heal patients, not kill them.

I accept on faith that nearly all doctors do their best to cure patients of injury or disease. But doctors, like all humans, make mistakes. The only difference is that their mistakes can be deadly.

In 2000, the Institute of Medicine released a report titled, "To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System (.pdf)," in which the authors estimated that between 44,000 and 98,000 people die each year as a result of medical errors.

The report isn't an assault on the medical profession. The authors recognize that human beings will make mistakes - hence the title. They are more concerned about procedural issues and market conditions that lead to medical mistakes, and fear of liability that might encourage hospitals and doctors to hide those errors.

To put the number of medical-error deaths into perspective, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that in 2002, 11,328 people were victims of homicide, 50,348 died of Alzheimer's disease, 57,180 of diabetes and 610,638 of heart disease.

Hidden within some of these figures are medical errors, which are among the leading causes of death in the United States. Heart disease might force you to go to a hospital, but a mistake on the operating table or in post-op might be the real reason that you died.

If the president wants to help cure our medical system, he should push Congress to pass more comprehensive safety procedures for hospitals. That would improve health care for consumers and, ultimately, make malpractice insurance cheaper for doctors, because there would be fewer mistakes and fewer lawsuits.

Instead, President Bush is pushing the simplistic approach of offering blanket protection for doctors against what he calls "baseless lawsuits."

There's no question that our civil court system is open to abuse by frivolous lawsuits, but a cap on damages isn't the answer. First, truly baseless lawsuits don't routinely survive our adversarial justice system; judges throw them out or juries rule against them. So the president's proposal actually is targeted at lawsuits that have merit. The cap on damages applies only after the judge or jury has concluded that malpractice was committed.

President Bush actually is telling doctors: "When you're found guilty of causing the death, disability or illness of a patient, Congress should protect you by making sure you never have to pay more than $250,000 for the pain and suffering you inflict."

Determining guilt or innocence and deciding on awards are matters that must be handled on a case-by-case basis, not by blanket legislation. When our leaders propose this type of liability protection, they do a real disservice to people who have been injured, and they show real contempt for the U.S. court system and the citizens who serve on juries.

Many leaders don't trust juries, even though juries are made up of the same citizens who voted the politicians into office. They think citizens are stupid, irresponsible and incapable of reaching logical conclusions. So they pass laws to limit liability, mandate sentences and otherwise undercut the decisionmaking of juries and the flexibility of the judicial branch.

Hopefully, Congress will have the good sense to pass on President Bush's proposal and leave medical malpractice rulings in courtrooms, where they belong.

© 2005 Denver Post

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