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William M. Sage, MD,JD

JAMA. 2001;286:226-228.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Health policy would be better off without certain terms. "Managed care" is one—no matter where one stands on consideration of cost in medical treatment. "Medical necessity" is another. But "malpractice liability" heads my list of semantic stowaways whose excess baggage imperils the vessel on which they travel. Much of the medical profession's resistance to regulatory accountability can be traced to the sense of betrayal and persecution most physicians feel when accused of malpractice.¹

This unfortunate tendency is evident in the crusade against medical error being waged by the "patient safety movement." An irony of that movement is its condemnation of malpractice lawyers.² For decades, the medical profession denounced malpractice suits on the grounds that few true quality problems existed.³ Leape, Berwick, and other patient safety gurus have devoted a good part of their careers to proving the profession wrong.^4-5 Nonetheless, these reformers echo the "no lawyers" . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Author Affiliation: Columbia Law School, New York, NY.

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