> Any law that limits the cases where patients can sue, or the amount of money they can collect, is likely to lower medical use in the hospital by less than the 5 percent they measured in their study. The telling thing about laws to address malpractice liability is that they typically are focused on capping large verdicts. But such laws are illogical: generally, large verdicts will be awarded where a doctor screwed u…
I remember looking up a meta analysis back when Obamacare was being debated about why doctors have a skewed perception of the liklihood of being sued (that part is apparently not controversial in the literature). Most of the reasons found were just basic human psychological errors (I heard Bob got sued and I'm not taking into account that I know a thousand people and that Bob is only giving me his side of the story). But I do also remember the point being brought up that medical malpractice lawsuits follow a power law distribution where a minority of doctors get sued the most and repeatedly, while the vast majority of doctors may occasionally get sued, but rarely lose (yet it creates a perception that they were lucky, even though they're good doctors).
I think my takeaway from that analysis was that doctors are just as illogical as everyone else when it comes to things that aren't medicine. So you shouldn't really be surprised that they're unduly influenced by large, visible, and rare lawsuits, because that's how everyone works psychologically.
