by Kiren Gopal
At a recent speech before the American Medical Association, President Obama expressed a concern for medical malpractice lawsuits and said that “we need to explore a range of ideas” to tackle the issue. However, the president hasn’t offered much in the way of clarification of his position on medical liability reform. The only indication was a reported comment of a White House spokeswoman who “pointed to his support as a senator for a mediation program known as ‘Sorry Works.’”
In 2006, then-Senators Obama and Clinton introduced MEDiC (National Medical Error Disclosure and Compensation). They wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that the program would provide grant money to health care providers to “implement programs for disclosure and compensation.” In practice, this means that health care providers would disclose medical errors to the patient, offer an apology, and then try to negotiate compensation. Additionally, the data yielded from the program would be analyzed to determine best practices. The potential benefits of such a program are manifold: improved quality of care, more effective doctor-patient communication, and lower administrative and legal costs.
