Proposition 46, the patient safety initiative on the November ballot, will save lives. For proof, take a look at what’s gone on in recent years just down Highway 101 in Santa Barbara.
That’s where a doctor named Julio Diaz was known as “The Candyman” for his willingness to overprescribe potentially addictive narcotics. Many of his patients died of overdoses, and investigators allege that many of the drugs he prescribed were then sold to others on the street and led to overdoses in people who weren’t his patients.
Dr. Diaz’s overprescribing ruined lives and had an impact beyond those who took the pills. Citizens all over Santa Barbara County were at risk because of what the addicts he created could have done, either while high on medication or while trying to score more drugs.
I know too well the damage that can cause. My two children, Troy and Alana, were 10 and 7 when they were run down and killed by a doctor-shopping prescription drug abuser who had obtained hundreds of pills from several different doctors. Not one of them bothered to check the state’s prescription database to see they were being played by an abuser.
That tragedy led me to help write and put Proposition 46 on the ballot, giving voters the opportunity to do what Sacramento lawmakers beholden to the medical-insurance industry won’t: Improve patient safety, promote better health care, and save lives.
Proposition 46 will require doctors and pharmacists to check an existing statewide prescription database before dispensing potentially addictive narcotics to a patient for the first time. That way they’ll know if that patient is already receiving those drugs from another doctor. And if a doctor like “The Candyman” chooses to ignore patient safety, pharmacists will be able to spot and stop overprescription.
In other states where use of similar prescription databases is mandated, such as New York, doctor shopping has declined dramatically, saving hundreds of millions of dollars in law enforcement resources and emergency responses. We will see similar savings in California under Proposition 46.
Reducing doctor shopping is just one of three ways that Proposition 46 will save lives and improve your medical safety.
Doctor drug and alcohol testing: California’s medical board reports that 18 percent of doctors could suffer substance abuse during their lifetime. Want a doctor under the influence practicing on you?
Proposition 46 would help by mandating random testing of physicians, a step advocated by the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as well as researchers at Johns Hopkins. Proposition 46 requires the Medical Board to suspend a doctor pending investigation of a positive test and to take disciplinary action if the doctor was impaired while on duty.
Pilots, police, and bus drivers are drug tested. Why not doctors who hold our lives in their hands?
Modernize malpractice cap: Proposition 46 would update California’s $250,000 pain-and-suffering damages cap for medical malpractice, adjusting it for nearly four decades of inflation and restoring the economic value it had when enacted by state lawmakers in 1975. Updating the cap will give hold negligent doctors
accountable and act as a deterrent.
Proposition 46 foes have claimed that health-care costs and medical malpractice premiums will go up, and doctors will flee California if the cap is updated. But they don’t provide proof, because there isn’t any.
Costs didn’t skyrocket and doctors didn’t flee in Illinois, Georgia, or Missouri when courts there struck down similar malpractice damages caps in recent years. Malpractice premiums are the same or lower, and each state now has more doctors per capita.
We need to improve patient safety because we live in a nation where up to 440,000 patients die each year of preventable medical errors. It’s staggering: Medical negligence in our own hospitals is now our third leading cause of death, behind only cancer and heart disease.
Any of us could become a victim of malpractice. You could be harmed by a doctor impaired by drugs or alcohol. Your life could be ruined by a prescription drug addict strung out on too many drugs obtained by doctor shopping.
As Election Day approaches, the TV advertising blitz against Proposition 46 is surging. Our foes’ campaign budget exceeds $56 million, mostly from the wildly profitable medical malpractice insurance industry that would rather spend money on deceptive advertising than use that money to compensate victims of medical negligence.
Instead of protecting insurance industry profits, Proposition 46 backers want to protect patients, ensure sober physicians, curb prescription drug abuse, and give victims of medical malpractice a fighting chance in court.
Taken together, it will save lives.
Bob Pack of Danville is the main proponent of Proposition 46. Send comments to the executive editor at rmiller@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 2-9, 2014.
