A new report says that states are endangering health-care patients by
failing to discipline doctors for incompetence, misprescribing drugs,
sexual misconduct, criminal convictions and other offenses.
The hefty four-volume study,
“20,125 Questionable Doctors,” published by the Washington-based
Public Citizen, finds that from 1990 through December 1999, 20,125 doctors had a total of 38,589 disciplinary actions taken against them.
The study found that the rate of serious disciplinary actions by state medical boards in 1999 was only 3.5 serious actions per 1,000 doctors, which the authors claim shows that only a small fraction of doctors face state sanctions each year, despite the 80,000 patients killed and 234,000 injured as a result of negligence in hospitals, most involving licensed physicians.
Dr. Sidney M. Wolfe, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, which conducted the research, told WorldNetDaily that the annual report is intended to help consumers make more informed decisions about which doctor to choose.
“Choosing a doctor is arguably one of the most critical choices consumers can make,” he said. “We believe the public should be armed with as much information as possible when doing so. Unfortunately, consumers can find out more about the care they plan to purchase than a doctor they plan to visit.”
Nationally, there were 2,696 serious disciplinary actions taken by state medical boards in 1999, down slightly from the 2,732 actions taken in 1998. Almost all of the disciplinary actions — 90.6 percent — taken in 1999 were for serious offenses, including substandard care, criminal convictions, substance abuse, sex-related offenses, misprescribing drugs, providing false information to the state board, loss of hospital privileges and insurance fraud. Yet despite the gravity of these offenses, only 48 percent of the state medical board disciplinary actions were serious: revocation, suspension or surrender of license, or probation/restriction of license.
These findings have researchers concerned.
“Doctors are not being disciplined as these offenses warrant. A very large percent were considered serious, but the actions taken by the state in most cases don’t match the seriousness of the offense,” Booth Gunter, spokesman for Public Citizen, told WorldNetDaily.
“What’s even more troubling is that the vast majority of doctors were never required to stop practicing, even temporarily, as part of the medical board sanctions,” Gunter said. “What I think this shows is that state medical boards are more inclined to protect the doctors rather than the patients.”
Gunter noted that of the 3,215 doctors sanctioned for substandard care, only about one-third had to stop practicing. Similarly, only about two-fifths of the 2,963 doctors with criminal convictions and about one-third of 1,715 doctors disciplined for substance abuse were required, even temporarily, to suspend practicing medicine.
The report ranks each state according to the “serious” actions taken against doctors by the state medical boards and provides a detailed listing of the actions and sanctions taken against all 21,125 doctors.
For 1999, states ranged from 10.34 serious actions per 1,000 doctors (Alaska) to 0.96 per 1,000 physicians (Delaware). In addition, the bottom 20 states all had rates of serious disciplinary action that were one-half or less than the rate of all of the top five states.
Overall, the “Questionable Doctors” study found that the top 10 states for disciplinary action were: Alaska, North Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Ohio, Mississippi, Vermont and Colorado.
The 10 states at the bottom of the list were Delaware, Nebraska, Tennessee, Minnesota, Hawaii, Connecticut, Kansas, South Dakota, Illinois and Wisconsin. In Public Citizen’s 1997 and 1998 reports, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Minnesota Wisconsin, Kansas, Hawaii and Delaware were also in the bottom 15 states. (Summary reports for each state are available on the Public Citizen
website.)
Among the
recommendations that Public Citizen researchers made in light of the report’s findings is for states to make state medical board disciplinary actions available promptly on the Internet, strengthening of the medical practice statutes, severing the relationships between medical boards and state medical societies, and better funding and staff increases for the state medical boards. They also encourage states to begin to weed bad doctors out earlier and ease the process for patients to make complaints with medical boards.
