Medical Malpractice Reform Now!

The time to give the poor and middle class victims of medical malpractice access to the court system for redress of their claims is way past due. The current Guam Legislature needs to remedy this outstanding injustice in our laws.

The previous two legislatures failed to reform the Medical Malpractice Mandatory Arbitration Act. The law – called MMMA Act for short – essentially requires victims to pay for arbitration that can cost upward of six digits if they want to pursue a claim of malpractice by a medical provider.

 

Even federal Judge Frances Tydingco-Gatewood acknowledged that Guam’s current MMMA Act effectively shuts out the majority of claimants from having access to the court system based solely on their ability to afford arbitration.

This has meant that scores of victims of alleged medical malpractice have been unable to hold bad doctors accountable, leaving these doctors who have allegedly butchered people through neglect and malpractice to continue practicing in Guam.

 

The problem is exacerbated by the Guam Board of Medical Examiners and the Guam Board of Nurse Examiners’ obvious unwillingness to hold their peers accountable for malpractice. Not a single claim made by victims has advanced to any measure of accountability in years. Trusting medical providers with intertwined financial interests to truthfully cull their ranks of the bad apples is akin to trusting the police to police the police.

Senators can help to fix this injustice by reforming the law. A proposal by Tina Muna Barnes in the previous legislature was acceptable to doctors but not the victim advocates. Another measure by Therese Terlaje was acceptable to victim advocates, but was torpedoed by doctors.

Somewhere between those two bills is an acceptable compromise.

 

The Muna Barnes measure would have instituted and collected fees into a fund that would help qualified victims to pay for arbitration. The problem was that the anticipated funding would have only been enough for a couple of claims per year. The Terlaje measure called for more sweeping reform, but the doctors complained that allowing victims to sue them would scare away potential providers. Some of the doctors threatened to shut down their practices in Guam if the bill became law.

Doctors who do their jobs – even those who make mistakes not borne from neglect – should have no problem with a law that allows any victim of malpractice to seek redress through the court system so long as a process is implemented to weed out frivolous claims.

 

As at least one loud doctor continues to impede the governor’s program to replace Guam Memorial Hospital with a new facility, it is more important than ever to institute accountability through MMMA Act reform if we’re all going to have to endure GMH’s dilapidating conditions while a new hospital is planned. And GMH on-staff providers should not enjoy immunity from claims. Senators need to qualify their immunity so that bad doctors and nurses at GMH can face legal and financial consequences for malpractice.

Senators need to find their gonads against the special interest bullying by some in the medical community to keep the status quo. While doctors should be protected from frivolous lawsuits, they should not be protected from answering to the killing and maiming of human life.