Liability Reform

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What You Can Do about Medical Liability Reform
A growing number of you have asked what you can do to help advance the medical liability reform debate and raise awareness among your patients on how they can become empowered advocates at the state and federal levels. In response, the ACC has designed a medical liability reform toolkit that gives you the resources necessary to engage your patients and gain their assistance in achieving medical liability reform.

The importance of this issue cannot be understated. As you are well aware, hospital trauma centers have had to close temporarily because staffing physicians could not find any liability insurance. Our colleagues in high-risk specialties, including orthopaedic surgeons and neurosurgeons, are no longer performing some high-risk procedures in an effort to reduce their own liability risk. Your own practice also may have been affected by the combination of increasing liability insurance costs and lagging reimbursement. There have been numerous anecdotal reports about practices that have had to lay off clinical staff or delay the purchase of new diagnostic equipment.

One thing is for sure: patient access to quality care has been affected by this problem and it will only get worse unless our state legislatures and Congress act!

We want to help you by making materials available to you for your patients and your practice. Materials such as a poster for your waiting room wall, brochures, a sample letter to patients and an educational flyer to place in your waiting room. These tools are available in the ACC Medical Liability Reform resource center, at: http://www.acc.org/advocacy/advoc_issues/rc_malpractice2.htm under the “Tools and Resources” tab. Alternatively, e-mail us at inacc@aol.com, and we will be happy to assist you.

I ask that you join your colleagues in this difficult fight and commit to using these materials in your practice…you cannot afford not to.