Our health care delivery system is deeply flawed. It is obscenely expensive, delivers spotty care that depends largely on where you live and how much money you have, and leaves many Americans out in the cold. These flaws create ripples that cause problems across society. One of the effects of the flawed system is exemplified by the very large malpractice verdicts arising out of birth injuries.
One of the great joys a person can experience in this life is the birth of a child. It is almost literally a miracle that there is a new person in the world who did not exist just nine months earlier. All those beautiful features and tiny fingerprints coming out of almost nowhere.
The moment of birth can be a source of great pain as well when a baby is born with significant problems. Sometimes those problems are the result of an unfortunate mix of genes, but at other times they are the result of doctors and nurses failing to do their jobs and allowing the baby to be harmed.
I have handled many birth cases over the years. The majority of them involved a baby who got into trouble and should have been promptly delivered, but was not. In these days of sophisticated fetal heart monitors, a lot of the guesswork has been removed from the process of monitoring the laboring mother. The fetal heart monitor strips record the mother’s contractions and the baby’s heart rate for the doctor and the nurses to see in real time.
In normal labor, when the mother has a contraction, the baby’s heart rate dips in response. As soon as the contraction is over, the baby’s heart rate rebounds. The heart rate shows beat-to-beat variability and some accelerations. In a labor that is having problems, the baby’s heart rate may dip without a contraction, or may dip late. It may not recover quickly after a contraction and may be flat and without much variability. These are signs that the baby is either already in trouble or may be getting there. They are valueless, however, if the nurses are not paying attention to them or are misinterpreting them. They are similarly of no value if the doctor is slow to respond and delays getting the baby out. When a baby is badly damaged at birth and the strip shows the baby getting in trouble and nothing being done, a lawsuit is almost inevitable.
These suits don’t always succeed, but when they do, they almost always result in a very large jury verdict. One of the things driving these large verdicts is the cost of the future medical care the baby is going to need. Many of these babies are profoundly damaged and will need a lot of care for many, many years. The cost of caring for a profoundly damaged baby over its life expectancy will be projected in the tens of millions of dollars.
By way of example, in May, a Chicago jury awarded just over $23,000,000 to a badly damaged child. The jury found that the doctors and the hospital nurses who delivered the baby did not respond appropriately to evidence that the baby was in distress and needed to be delivered immediately.
Similarly, within the last year a Maricopa County jury returned a verdict of $31,000,000 in a birth injury case. Other birth injury verdicts in the last year were reported in the following amounts: $78.5M, $120M, $20M, $9.8M, and $14.5M. I could go on, but I am sure you get the point.
Lawsuits are a terrible way to pay for the care a badly damaged child is going to need for the rest of its life. Lawsuits are hit or miss. They are expensive. They use up valuable societal resources that are needed elsewhere. They are stressful for everyone involved. They are disruptive to the doctors and hospitals being sued. As readers of this blog know, the return of a large verdict is only the start of a long process of post-verdict motions and post-judgment appeals. Wouldn’t it be better if we paid for this care directly? If we did not force the family of the child to sue? If we didn’t make the family financially responsible for the burden of caring for this child for the rest of its life?
We need universal health care, like the rest of the civilized world already has. Unfortunately, there is big money being made by those who like the inefficient, expensive system just the way it is. They are not going to let that money get away from them, if they can help it. Until we can overcome them, we are just going to have to limp along with our very imperfect system of malpractice cases. Not good.
