Pennsylvania Injury Law Report : Pennsylvania Personal Injury Lawyer & Attorney : Stuart Carpey Law Firm : Auto Accidents & Product Liability : Pennsylvania Injury Law Report

Last week Governor Rendell stated he will not be seeking to renew the state funded subsidy for medical malpractice premiums known as MCARE due to the fact that any "medical malpractice crisis"  is officially over. The Medical Care Availability and Reduction of Error Program, or MCARE provides $500,000 in liability insurance in addition to the $500,000 in coverage medical providers must buy from the private insurance market.

MCARE was designed to provide additional professional liability insurance to doctors and hospitals in Pennsylvania at subsidized, and therefore reduced, premium rates. 

Statewide, there has been a 41 per cent drop in malpractice lawsuits in the last decade. Judicial rule changes and new laws implemented in 2002 have been extraordinarily effective in abating and reducing the malpractice insurance premium rates, Rendell said at a news conference.

The statistics in the report published by the Adminstrative Office of the Pennsylvania Courts, and which Rendell relied upon, make clear that any argument that Pennsylvania is in a medical malpractice crises is simply no longer true. Premiums that doctors and hospitals pay for coverage have gone down. Moreover,today there are 57 carriers writing malpractice coverage in Pennsylvania as compared to 3 in 2002.

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In Pennsylvania, defendants, and the insurance companies who represent them, have the right to have an injured claimant examined by an "independent" doctor so that the doctor can render an opinion as to the physical condition of the claimant and the relation of the injury to the accident. The problem is that these doctors are hired by the insurance companies, so they are anything but independent.

Boilerplate reports, where the doctor uses the same report for each person he or she examines, seeing numerous people in the same day, all without being required to adhere to the doctor-patient privilege, leads to questionable methods of obtaining an "independent expert" opinion. This has been thoroughly looked at in a recent New York Times article about these types of practices taking place in the New York workers compensation system.

The best way for an injured person making a personal injury claim to prepare for these types of exams is to know what to expect. I've written on this subject before. I also make sure my clients are not alone when they attend these exams. That way, an unbiased witness can not only record how the exam was conducted, but can also record what the defense physician asked and said at the exam. If it is different from what's in his report for the insurance company, the doctor can be easily cross examined at trial and be forced to explain the discrepancy.

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I have two teenagers who are driving. My 16 year old daughter has her permit.  My son is 19 and has been driving for a few years.

My method of initiating them to being behind the wheel was to take them to an empty parking lot  on a Sunday morning and have them drive in reverse, only in reverse, for the first few days. They hated that. But when they got to go forward they realized there was method to my madness. If you have never been in the passenger seat with a teen who just got their driving permit I can tell you it is a terrifying experience. My daughter's driving instructor told me it's much easier for him, not just because he has nerves of steel, but because he has a brake in the passenger seat. He has installed a few of those into some of the parents' cars of the kids that he's teaching. He offered to put one in my Honda CRV, but I declined.

Teens know about the dangers of drinking and driving. They may not appreciate the dangers because they are teens, but they are  told.

However,an equal if not greater danger to teens as drivers and as passengers in a car driven by another teen is cell phones. I insist that my daughter turn her phone off and put it in the trunk when she drives. I don't make or receive calls when I'm driving or when I'm a passenger. I just turn the phone off. It's simply too tempting to answer it. I hope my kids model my behavior.

In early April a twenty-two-year-old Pennsylvania driver pleaded no contest to homicide by vehicle and careless driving resulting in an unintentional death.  He was sentenced  to 10 to 23 months in York County Prison. I sent that story to my kids. I can only hope it sunk in.

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Layoffs are pounding the legal profession in the Philadelphia legal community. Firms are merging in order to stay alive in the recession. Wolf Block, with over 300 lawyers,  went under in late March. In early March, Morgan Lewis & Bockius announced it was laying off 55 lawyers and 161 support staff. Big and medium size law firms have lots of overhead in terms of salaries, rent, equipment, you name it. They can't be nimble in an economic downturn, at least not nimble enough. They can't change course quckly enough to catch new opportunities in the legal marketplace.

Of course, the same pressures that medium and large law firms face are no different than the pressures faced by other businesses. Any business owner can testify to the fact that opportunities for growth abound, even in this recession. But  slight adjustments in a company's or law firm's business plan must be on the books (at all times) and ready to be acted upon (when needed).

Smaller law firms don't face quite the same financial pressures as their larger counterparts. In this economy, that could turn out to be a benefit for consumers in need of legal services.

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