Court dumps liability on doctors

Unless overturned, expect a Louisiana appeals court decision to have doctors second-guessing their patient transfer decisions based on law -- not medicine.

Editorial. Nov. 19, 2001.

Experience has shown that legal system approaches to prevent "patient dumping" have the tendency to stray into the territory of remedies that are good in intention but troubling in execution. An extreme case in point is the judicial activism in a Louisiana appellate court in the matter of Coleman v. Deno.

A majority of the state's 4th Circuit Court of Appeal took upon itself to create a new and broad basis on which to hold physicians liable over emergency department transfer decisions. Instead of the widely accepted recourse of a medical malpractice lawsuit -- and it's debatable if the doctor in this case was even culpable by that standard -- the court decreed that a physician could be sued for intentional patient dumping. That's a standard heretofore applied typically to hospitals, and rightly so.

It is perhaps the only ruling of its type in the nation, and it flies in the face of both federal and Louisiana anti-dumping laws, both of which exclude physicians from private lawsuits over such improper transfers.

The case has been appealed to the Louisiana Supreme Court, where state and local medical societies have joined with the AMA/State Medical Society Litigation Center in a friend-of-the-court brief sharply critical of the ruling.

If simply the idea alone of this new way to sue a doctor doesn't have Louisiana physicians second-guessing their transfer decisions, the eye-popping roughly $3 million personal liability of the doctor in this case certainly will. Since that part of the award was placed outside the realm of malpractice, which is considered the unintentional harming of a patient, neither a physician's liability insurance nor the state's malpractice award cap applies. [...]