Health Courts: The stealth attack on juries continues

The Robert Wood Johnson has just given the corporate tort reform group Common Good a $1 million grant to establish pilot "health courts" in several states around the country. Leading the way is Maryland, which apparently is going to have hearings soon in the legislature about creating specialized courts that would only hear medical malpractice cases (Common Good prefers the less threatening term "medical liability" cases, rather than malpractice).

The health court idea has been embraced by some Democrats and liberals as a "third way" solution to the medical malpractice lawsuit "crisis." The measures are basically designed to get rid of juries in med mal cases and replace them with appointed "expert" judges. Damages would be capped, as would legal fees, but supposedly these things will make medicine safer and the law more "predictable."

No surprise that this effort is taking root in Maryland, which is one of the few states that has managed to fend off further restrictions on medical malpractice lawsuits in recent years, despite having a Republican governor. It's also home to Johns Hopkins University, whose president, William Brody MD, is big in the tort reform movement. But last I checked, Maryland didn't seem to have any shortage of doctors, and it didn't have a lot of med mal litigation, either, as Maryland has long capped damages in these sorts of lawsuits. Maryland does, though, have its share of rotten doctors, whose problems with lawsuits have been swept under the rug. The Baltimore Sun ran a prize-winning series in 2005 highlighting the way the state medical board protected the doctors more than the public. Health courts would only make the problem worse by allowing more of patient's complaints to be forced underground...