Suffer the Little Children

Speaking of Mississippi...On Sunday the New York Times ran a story about the state's big jump in infant mortality rates, the first after years of progress. The story directly implicates Gov. Haley Barbour, who campaigned on a pledge to cut Medicaid. Once elected, he did exactly that, dropping 54,000 people off the rolls. Not surprisingly, a good number of those people were pregnant women who now aren't getting prenatal care, and their babies are dying at a frightening rate.

The story didn't mention that Barbour had also campaigned on a major tort reform platform and that he signed a bill in 2004 capping noneconomic damage awards in medical malpractice lawsuits. Doctors and Republicans had lobbied for the bill with the dubious claim that it would expand access to health care across the state and notably, would keep ob/gyns delivering babies in underserved areas. The Times story is yet more evidence that the tort system has scant little to do with pregnant women's ability to see a doctor. Of course, Gov. Barbour probably knew that....

Comments

[tortdeforminms]

Maybe the infant mortality rates have jumped because after the MS legislature passed the ridiculous tort deform protecting negligent doctors, those same negligent doctors (OB/GY's in this case) can get away with murder, excuse me, negligent killing, because injured/dead baby cases are too expensive for most lawyers to handle and the abominable statute-mandated return does not economically justify the great effort and expense that these cases take.