Malpractice

Physician, Protect Thyself: 7 Simple Ways Not to Get Sued for Medical Malpractice
$24.95
Recommended reading for any and all health care professionals. My partner loaned me his copy and I read it in a few hours and then immediately bought my own copy to keep handy. Very coincidental the NEJM study just came out reflecting what a poor job we do of communicating with our patients, as this author has a whole chapter explaining how we can improve those skills. I particularly liked the chapter on proper informed consent, as I had never heard a lot of that information. Most of the explanations are simple and straightforward, which we non-lawyers appreciate, and it was quite helpful to have the primer on med mal lawsuits at the beginning of the book. Overall, an outstanding educational tool.

Medical Malpractice
$42.00
A good book on a contentious topic. Written by an experienced health care economist and an attorney, the authors attempt to provide a broad perspective on medical malpractice. Sloan and Chepke agree that there are serious problems with medical malpractice, but not the problems generally discussed in most public forums. The intermittant public attention paid to this issue is driven often by intermittant malpractice 'crises' in which insurers withdraw from markets, premiums escalate sharply, and there is fear of consequent physician withdrawal from states with sharply rising premiums. A common popular perception of these crises is that they are driven by excessive tort litigation and awards. In fact, there is little evidence for this explanation and recurrent malpractice insurance crises apparently have their roots in other phenomena, notably cyclical features of the insurance industry. Another common public point of discussion is that malpractice litigation is a significant contributor to rising health care costs. The available evidence, however, suggests that malpractice torts have at best a modest effect on health care costs.
Where Sloan and Chepke see major problems with malpractice torts is their apparent failure to have an impact on the high rate of serious medical errors in the USA. In addition, the data cited by Sloan and Chepke indicates that the tort system does a poor and inefficient job of compensating individuals injured through negligence. Sloan and Chepke discuss the first generation of tort reforms which are mainly caps on awards. The major effects of these reforms has been indeed to reduce awards, claims, and insurance premiums with the primary beneficiaries being physicians and insurers. It appears that first generation reforms are a stereotypical example of successful interest group lobbying of state legislatures with modest general public benefits.
Much of the book is a systematic discussion of proposed reforms including such topics as alternative dispute resolution, specialized health courts, no-fault procedures, and a number of others. These discussions are generally thorough, contain nice summaries of the usually limited evidence, and discouraging in the sense that Sloan and Chepke demonstrate the uncertainties that any proposed reforms will work and point out the pragmatic political obstacles to most of these proposed reforms.
Sloan and Chepke conclude with a chapter proposing a series of modest reforms, particularly focused on making hospitals or hospital systems the focus on malpractice litigation in the hope that this will produce incentives to improve patient safety. This is reasonable and approaches like the one proposed are used by some academic hospital systems where physicians are employees.
Sloan and Chepke may make a couple of errors. As they point out, the tort system does a poor job of identifying and compensating meritorious claims. At the same time, a lot of claims pursued do lack merit. But this irrational element is one of the things that physicians most dislike about the present system. While the tort system may not be the 'lottery' claimed by many critics, its irrational enough to be worrisome to health care providers. There is also some recent evidence that some forms of torts do reduce medical errors. Nonetheless, Sloan and Chepke's analysis is convincing and their modest suggestions for reform quite reasonable.

Media Malpractice: How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Targeted
$19.99
In the production-values department, "Media Malpractice" may feel a bit rushed in spots but as of right now it's the most important post-election analysis released and couldn't be more timely or necessary.
As Ziegler marvelously stated as the film moved to a close:

This is not about President Obama. This is all about the unprecedented and dangerous media coverage that led to his election, and likely lead to his re-election. Our republic was founded on the concept that our electorate must be informed, and our elections be fair. As you have just seen, the evidence is overwhelming that our media has let us down in nearly every respect. If the grotesque display that we witnessed in 2008 does not provoke a backlash against this obvious reality, we may have just reached the point of no return.

Malpractice [Explicit]
$9.49
A lot of people hate on this album, based only on the commercial/club hit Let's Get Dirty. C'mon y'all!!! Don't 4get this a REDMAN album! It was released in 2001. 2001 was dominated by artists like Nelly who made their livin' off commercial/club music. This album flew under the radar because it only had one song like that. The other 22 tracks still got that Grimey Brick City Funk Doc sound. Skits are funny. The beats are bangin'. And I challenge anyone to say the lyrics are anything but fire! GILLA HOUSE!!!!!!!