A recent article by the Associated Press discussed the implications of a 2005 change to Connecticut’s medical malpractice law. That change was meant to keep frivolous medical malpractice lawsuits out of the court, but has kept legitimate cases out as well.
The 2005 change requires medical malpractice patients to obtain a medical expert’s opinion in favor of their claim before they are allowed to bring a lawsuit alleging a medical professional’s or hospital’s negligence. While the requirement doesn’t seem difficult on its face, it provides an opportunity for defendants and their attorneys to attack the experts’ credentials and, if successful, get the case dismissed.
The law states that the medical experts who submit the opinion letters must have credentials similar to the defendant’s; however, some Connecticut judges have held that the credentials must be nearly identical, leading to a number of case dismissals.
Unfortunately, a bill to ease the requirements, drafted by both Republican and Democratic lawmakers, was not addressed by the 2011 Senate due to opposition from the medical field.
Should a medical professional’s credentials matter enough to dismiss a case that obviously has merit? The Connecticut Supreme Court addressed this issue in January 2011. In that case, a doctor failed to diagnose a New Milford man’s fractures after he was injured in a Connecticut car accident. According to the lawsuit, the pain caused by the fractures led to a heart condition that killed the victim. The Supreme Court upheld prior dismissals, stating that the opinion letter came from a trauma surgeon while the defendant in the case was an ER doctor.
Since 2005, medical malpractice cases have dropped nearly 20 percent, which many Connecticut malpractice attorneys attribute to the mandate. There are no statistics telling us how many meritorious medical malpractice claims have been dismissed or have simply not been filed because of this rule, but even one case is far too many.
In other states – Arkansas, Ohio, Oklahoma and Washington – laws requiring opinion letters have been found to be unconstitutional since the letters can be very expensive (in many cases, thousands of dollars). We expect this year’s Legislature to reconsider the mandate. Hopefully, injured people and families who have lost loved ones to medical malpractice will no longer also have to suffer at the hands of the legal system.
Source: CBS News, “Conn. Law nixing legitimate malpractice lawsuits,” Associated Press, Jan. 8, 2012.