> For one, isn't it true that many (most?) doctors in the USA have malpractice insurance? Any lawsuit win against them doesn't make much personal financial difference, just increases medical costs for everyone else as the payment to the 'victim' (not the actual direct victim in this case) is just socialised and dispersed.
Let's say a doctor screws up and you end up having to do an extremely expensive procedure to fix that. Wouldn't winning a malpractice lawsuit allow you to cover those expenses? That's just one of the ways medical malpractice lawsuits make sense.
> For another, presumably the underlying logic of malpractice suits is to punish the underlying error in order to incentivise ... something ... that would prevent a recurrence. Is there any plausible, actionable outcome here which would prevent this type of repeated human error in future? One that that isn't counterbalanced by costs that would yield worse outcomes in other cases?
Honest question: what do you think is grounds for a medical malpractice lawsuit these days? As far as I've been able to figure out, it seems that there has to be some kind of relatively serious, provable negligence involved.
> If so, why are we so sure the courts are best placed to locate and enforce this vs the medical profession itself, which I believe already aims to save as many lives as possible?
I'm having a hard time addressing that idea, because your way of thinking is foreign to me. Look, we are talking about things that seriously screw up people's lives or even end them. To me, your idea of self-regulated medical profession sounds like proposing that, instead of suing the truck driver who ran over your kid, you should let his employer deal with him.
> In the software industry there are no malpractice suits.
Medicine and software industry are not the same thing.
> random people who happened to sweet-talk the court into perceiving "malpractice" vs ordinary mistakes
Well, there it is. You seem to believe that there is no such thing as malpractice, it's all just "ordinary mistakes" that just might end up killing people or screwing up their health permanently.
Let's say a doctor screws up and you end up having to do an extremely expensive procedure to fix that. Wouldn't winning a malpractice lawsuit allow you to cover those expenses? That's just one of the ways medical malpractice lawsuits make sense.
> For another, presumably the underlying logic of malpractice suits is to punish the underlying error in order to incentivise ... something ... that would prevent a recurrence. Is there any plausible, actionable outcome here which would prevent this type of repeated human error in future? One that that isn't counterbalanced by costs that would yield worse outcomes in other cases?
Honest question: what do you think is grounds for a medical malpractice lawsuit these days? As far as I've been able to figure out, it seems that there has to be some kind of relatively serious, provable negligence involved.
> If so, why are we so sure the courts are best placed to locate and enforce this vs the medical profession itself, which I believe already aims to save as many lives as possible?
I'm having a hard time addressing that idea, because your way of thinking is foreign to me. Look, we are talking about things that seriously screw up people's lives or even end them. To me, your idea of self-regulated medical profession sounds like proposing that, instead of suing the truck driver who ran over your kid, you should let his employer deal with him.
> In the software industry there are no malpractice suits.
Medicine and software industry are not the same thing.
> random people who happened to sweet-talk the court into perceiving "malpractice" vs ordinary mistakes
Well, there it is. You seem to believe that there is no such thing as malpractice, it's all just "ordinary mistakes" that just might end up killing people or screwing up their health permanently.