The legal liability regime: how well is it doing in assuring quality, accounting for costs, and coping with an evolving reality in the health care marketplace?

Professor Blumstein's timely article deals with two competing paradigms that provide the poles in the spectrum of legal liability regimes. The "professional" or "scientific" model of liability assumes a rigidly normative approach to medical practice while the second more recent paradigm reflects the principles of marketplace economics in considering cost and resource availability to determine quality of care standards. Professor Blumstein concludes that the traditional approach to determining legal liability is being eroded by both the economics of managed care and the recent emphasis on systemic management of health care to promote patient safety, and that the traditional regime will have to "bend" in order to remain legally viable.