Word: judgmentalism
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Your story on Navy Surgeon Commander Donal Billig [MEDICINE, March 3] focuses attention on "widespread deficiencies in the nation's military health care system." There is a more insidious problem: physicians will not pass judgment on colleagues. Billig was fired from two private-sector positions before he went to Bethesda. But he could have found another job in a private hospital and still be practicing. The lesson to be learned from this episode reflects not just on the military but on the entire medical community. Joyce Gelfond, M.D. San Antonio...
What happened? Lawyers and consumer activists charge that insurers are paying the price--or, rather, trying to make the public pay the price--for their own mismanagement and bad judgment. Liability insurance has always been a notoriously cyclical industry. Says Robert Hunter, head of the National Insurance Consumer Organization: "At the top of the cycle you write [policies for] everybody, no matter how bad, and at the bottom you cancel everybody, no matter how good. It's a manic-depressive cycle...
...being posted go far beyond what is justified. Sneers Gerry Spence, a famed Wyoming trial lawyer (no relation to Miami's J.B. Spence): "What the insurance companies have done is to reverse the business so that the public at large insures the insurance companies." Consumerists often point to the judgment of Wall Street, hardly a Naderite stronghold. Stock traders bid up the price of property-casualty insurance shares an average of about 50% last year, in the apparent belief that the industry at minimum is on its way back to solid profitability...
...municipal services. The city council of Blue Island, Ill. (pop. 22,000), last October voted down a 30% increase in property taxes thought necessary to pay rocketing liability-insurance premiums, and the town expects to self-insure for the 1986-87 fiscal year, taking a chance that a large judgment might force taxes up anyway. Five counties in Missouri closed their jails for several weeks last fall, sending some prisoners elsewhere for incarceration and releasing minor offenders outright. The jails reopened after the counties' sheriffs set up a self-insurance pool, which was financed by tax money...
...that they charge the public. Says Browne Greene, president-elect of the California Trial Lawyers Association: "Their greed takes us back to the robber barons of the 19th century." Many consumer organizations add that insurers are seeking unjustified premium hikes to cover up their own bad management and poor judgment of risks...