Philadelphia Injury Attorney Blog

It is not uncommon for the experienced Philadelphia medical malpractice lawyers at Reiff & Bily to receive inquiries from victims of medical and hospital errors ranging from infection to leaving surgical instruments inside a patient which were easily preventable medical errors if proper checks and balances were followed. Worse yet, hospitals and doctors continue to bill and charge patients for the cost of treating these medical mistakes.

Presently, a bill has cleared the New Jersey State Senate and has been forwarded to the assembly which would prevent hospitals from charging anyone for serious medical errors. This legislation would also require states to make public individual hospital errors while currently hospitals are only required to report preventable life-threatening mistakes and the state only releases total numbers and not for individual hospitals. Under the current bill, the state would have to publish how often certain errors occur at each hospital. While the field of medicine is never without mistakes, it is important to increase transparency and require hospitals and physicians to assume the costs of preventable errors. According to statistics, 98,000 Americans die every year from preventable medical mistakes, which is almost 2,000 people per week.