How many are there supposed to be?

” Defensive medicine is variously estimated to cost the US $200 billion to $700 billion.”

If you have an estimate that wide, your number doesn’t mean much.

“Every normal person expects trial lawyers to argue eloquently and persistently against tort reform, just as buggy whip manufacturers argued against the advent of the automobile. This is probably the main reason why more people do not take you seriously.”

Perhaps. But no one takes it seriously until it’s them who is injured by someone else’s negligence.

“I’m curious as to why we would want a policy insulating ER docs from their negligence, even gross negligence? Are there some statistics out there showing that Ohio has some problem this will solve?”

You are curiously adept at missing the point. There is a serious and growing shortage of ER docs, as well as ERs nationwide. Defensive medicine is variously estimated to cost the US $200 billion to $700 billion.

Every normal person expects trial lawyers to argue eloquently and persistently against tort reform, just as buggy whip manufacturers argued against the advent of the automobile. This is probably the main reason why more people do not take you seriously.

We just published a longer story: Emergency doctors nationwide finding protection from ERs gone wild. Ohio is the latest state to tackle the issue.

There’s a lot of issues raised by it, but let me highlight one. One portion says “… a physician who provides emergency medical services … in compliance with the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, … is not liable in damages to any person in a tort action for injury, death, or loss to person or property that allegedly arises from an act or omission of the physician in the physician’s provision of those services or that treatment or care if that act or omission does not constitute willful or wanton misconduct.”

That’s an interesting one. So are they only protected while they do the “screening & stabilization” required under EMTALA? If so, then this “immunity” gets sliced up by a lot of the case law out there limited EMTALA’s reach.

Take your “Trial of a WhiteCoat” patient: his problem, and the alleged malpractice, occurred once he was already in the ER, and apparently after a basic screening had been done and had found no emergency condition. At that point, EMTALA stopped applying; I’d argue the immunity did, too.

I don’t know what the drafters of the bill are getting at, but, as worded, I’d say they’ve just handed a couple million dollars in extra billing to insurance defense lawyers, and have subtracted from plaintiffs’ lawyers (and judges!) thousands of hours trying to interpret federal case law on EMTALA.