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Profiteers of Fear: The Not-So-Secret Agenda of the Health Insurance Industry

Profiteers of Fear: Insurance Companies and Medical Malpractice in New York

A recent study of medical malpractice verdicts in New York City during 2001 conducted by the Verdict-Search New York Reporter and published last May in the Center for Justice & Democracy showed that insurance companies paid about $657 million in verdicts to New York City’s victims of medical malpractice that year. At first glance, this may seem like a staggering sum, but it’s really just a fraction of what insurance companies wrest from New York City’s healthcare system each year. With 72 hospitals and nearly 42,000 licensed doctors in the greater New York area, conservative estimates are that insurance companies collect just above $3 billion a year in medical malpractice insurance premiums in the Big Apple. In other words, for every dollar they spend on paying for the medical malpractice and negligence of those it insures, the health insurance industry keeps roughly $3.75 for itself. No matter what type of business you are in, that’s a heck of a profit margin.

So what do insurance companies do with all this excess cash? Like any successful business, they spend money to make more money, investing in ways that will increase their margins of profit even more. Fundamentally, there’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Every company has a right to protect and increase its profits. The problem here is that insurance companies do little to nothing to address the problems that directly cause medical malpractice: overstressed or incompetent doctors, surgeons, and other healthcare professionals and the chaotic environments in which they often work. Rather than using its profits to take an active hand in leading a long-overdue review of healthcare standards, processes and personnel, it prefers to spend money on camera friendly advertising and political lobbying to create and control laws that undercut the rights of medical malpractice victims.

One of the leading causes of death in the United States remains the simple act of going to the hospital. Each year, more deaths occur as a result of medical errors than automobile accidents, handguns, breast cancer and AIDS, averaging between 80,000 and 100,000 fatalities. Hundreds of thousands more endure moderate and serious injuries caused by nurses, doctors and healthcare professionals, many of which go unreported. In every sector of the healthcare industry, hospitals and insurance companies are extending their financial interests well ahead of the well-being and quality care of patients, increasingly forcing patients to leave their rights in the waiting room.

So why don’t insurance companies take the high road, institute higher standards of healthcare and insist that the organizations that govern doctors and hospitals discipline and monitor them so that the American healthcare system is reasonably safe for all of us? Because bringing about a real and lasting reduction in medical malpractice cases would require a major upheaval in the healthcare industry, and this would upset too many paying doctors. From an insurance company’s perspective, it’s easier to simply charge doctors more in malpractice insurance each year, blame rate increases on a legal system gone wild, and work quietly within state and federal legislatures to make blatant medical errors and mistakes more permissible under the light of the law.

But as much as the health insurance industry would like to persuade the American public that medical malpractice is a legal loophole exploited by greedy and opportunistic lawyers, and that science and technology has evolved far enough to make human error impossible in most medical situations, and that people who claim to be victims of medical malpractice are just an annoying breed of whining hypochondriacs looking for an easy buck, these claims always lose to the facts about medical malpractice in America and in New York.

In recent years, many attorneys have bowed to the tremendous legal pressure the insurance industry has exerted on the rights of medical malpractice victims and those who support them, refusing to take on medical malpractice due to the time, costs and risks involved. But there are also attorneys who steadfastly refuse to submit to big insurance’s master plan. New York City medical malpractice attorney Gerry Oginski proudly counts himself among the latter. He believes that medical malpractice victims and their families have an important right to pursue accountability in their medical care, and as an attorney, supporting and facilitating that right is the most valuable service he can offer. Providing you and your family with a powerful platform so that your case can be heard above the self-serving shouts of the insurance industry requires the focus and skill of an attorney that can take full control of your case and guide it to results dictated by justice, and not by an insurance company’s bottom line. Gerry Oginski has been the lawyer New York medical malpractice victims and their families have so often turned to for confident and determined legal advice. Contact Gerry today for help with your medical malpractice claim.

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