PRESIDENT of the Australian Medical Association Steve Hambleton says the national disability insurance scheme will reduce the number of expensive claims lodged after bad births or pregnancies.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The two huge payouts made recently at Calvary Public Hospital both related to infants with long-term disabilities that brought the burden of lifelong expenses for their families.
While Dr Hambleton did not comment on these specific cases, he said in general terms the most practical way for parents to fund expensive lifelong care was through the legal system.
''The one thing the AMA was asking for was a long-term care scheme for the disabled - one of the costs that used to be tacked on to insurance claims - and now we've got it,'' he said.
''It also means [families] don't have to go through the lottery of the courts because long-term care is guaranteed.''
While it would reduce legal action, it did not necessarily mean the health system would pay fewer of the costs for medical negligence. Dr Hambleton said the health industry would pay money into DisabilityCare from a medical indemnity pool.
It should, however, reduce stress for doctors in cases of misadventure where they had done everything correctly but there had been a recognised complication.
''It puts intense pressure on a person, having somebody questioning your decisions,'' he said. He said most doctors had had a stressful letter arrive from an unhappy patient or an insurance company investigating a claim made by a patient.
The benefits of DisabilityCare in reducing the number of medical negligence cases follows changes made a decade ago to cut medical practitioners' insurance costs.
These included the Premium Support Scheme, where the federal government paid money to help doctors with particularly high insurance costs, and the Run-Off Cover Scheme that ensured retired practitioners were still covered with medical indemnity for work they had done.
