PROTECT CONSUMER JUSTICE.ORG

The California Department of Public Health handed penalties to 14 hospitals for “noncompliance with licensing requirements [that] caused, or was likely to cause, serious injury or death to patients.”

A report from the non-profit watchdog group Texas Watch says “tort reform” there has changed the state’s legal system so that it “perverts the rule of law into an instrument for the moneyed and powerful, as well as divorces it from any concept of justice.”

On August 16 in Fresno, a three-judge panel of California’s Fifth District Court of Appeal heard arguments why the state’s MICRA (Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act of 1975) law limiting compensation for medical negligence should be overturned.

A neurosurgeon who has been sanctioned by the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice has left that state, which has no limits on compensation for injured patients, to practice in Texas, where physicians’ liability is capped. But his Texas medical record shows no evidence of the more than $3 million paid to settle malpractice claims against him in Minnesota, and he is not obligated to be supervised by another surgeon as he was in Minnesota.

Steven Olsen was a bright 2-year-old when medical negligence left him profoundly brain damaged. Two decades later, his parents remain potent advocates for correcting California’s $250,000 cap on human suffering.

Washington Post/Kaiser Health News: Even though medical experts agree operating on the wrong body part should never happen, some researchers say the problem of wrong-site surgery is getting worse.

California Watch: The AG’s office has filed legal documents arguing hospitals in the state must file monthly reports on infections related to 29 types of surgeries under a 2008 state law, while the California Hospital Association says state regulators haven’t followed the process for making the rules.