What's Wrong with Self Policing?

What we know for sure is that we are incapable of self-policing, despite everything that the free market advocates say. Whether it's doctors, lawyers, bankers, pharmaceutical companies, or the other giants of industry, there is the tendency to hide our mistakes so that no one sues. It's called cowardice and greed. So rather than blame the trial attorneys, and the "lottery" sense of some victims of corporate neglect that they are entitled to collect damages that will launch them into another class, let's reexamine the concept of self-policing and come up with some less costly alternatives.

And remember, I'm a former trial lawyer who often refused to take cases for one reason: there were no real damages.

We need layers of regulation and enforcement, but the regulation and enforcement should be to make change systematically so that these kinds of mistakes won't happen again, not to enrich the victims or their attorneys.

I read with some trepidation this morning in the New York Times, a piece about the cervical cancer vaccine Gardasil.

Believing the literature when the vaccine came out, and understanding that the way I raised my daughter, to love her body, that she would be sexually active, I wanted her protected. Now I see that the testing of the vaccine was incomplete, because like most FDA testing, it was unsupervised corporate-backed research. It's trustworthiness is highly suspect.

So back to health care reform, we need a way to police the medical profession to lower the cost of malpractice insurance, remove incompetent doctors from practice, and encourage improvement in how medical services are delivered.