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St. Pete Hacks

Stenography from this morning’s SP Times:

Thirteen years ago, Dr. Manuel Alvarado chose Leesburg as the place he would deliver babies. He liked its quiet streets and small-town charm.

He was one of 10 obstetricians in the area. Now there are just five.

The departed include Alvarado's recent partner, who left because he couldn't afford malpractice insurance. Alvarado can't either. He's practicing without, sending high-risk patients to other cities and wondering whether he should leave, too.

So the study published in a national journal Monday was no surprise to him. A survey of 781 doctors in rural Florida found that more than half have cut back on procedures vital to every town, from delivering babies to staffing emergency rooms. Most of them cited rising malpractice premiums as a key reason for the cutbacks.

The 2003 survey appears to be the first scientific data backing a hotly contested claim made by state doctors during the last two years of malpractice wars. State medical lobbyists have said doctors were being forced to make cutbacks, but had few hard numbers to support their claims.

"Their (malpractice insurance) rates go up doing that, so they decide it's not worth it, so they quit," said Dr. Dennis Agliano, a Tampa surgeon who is president of the Florida Medical Association. "The things that have higher risk, they're going to eliminate."

Officials with a state advocacy group for Florida trial lawyers, who often are on the other side of the malpractice debate, declined to comment Monday.

In the survey, childbirth was the procedure most likely to be reduced or stopped entirely. More than 61 percent of the doctors who responded said they had cut back on normal deliveries, and almost 53 percent reported cutbacks on Caesarean sections.

More than 51 percent reported limiting their hospital surgeries, and almost 47 percent cut back on emergency room duties.

"We're disconcerted at the level of cutbacks in services to these vulnerable populations in rural areas," said Dr. Bob Brooks, associate dean for health affairs at Florida State University's College of Medicine and lead author of the study, which was published in Archives of Internal Medicine.

Uh, the Archives of Internal Medicine, is run by the JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, which is fighting hard for tort reform. So, the SP Times is simply parroting the claims of a professional group that has a vested interest in pushing the idea that we are in some kind of malpractice crisis that can only be fixed by severely limiting the rights of a patient to demand accountability from a doctor.

Casually calling this group a “national journal” without qualifying the fact that they are run by the AMA is outrageous. Oh, wait - the SP Times probably just reprinted a press release verbatim without bothering to read it, so maybe they weren’t aware of what they were printing in their paper.