The empirical literature on defensive medicine includes studies utilizing date at the state or county level. In comparison to the rest of the literature, these jurisdictional studies typically find the least evidence that rising malpractice liability costs induce cost-increasing or quality-reducing practices by physicians. A key assumption in these studies is that changes in malpractice pressur...

that a significantly higher proportion of non-Caucasian students were learning-disabled and that learning disability predicted whether students tested positive on the SASSI, but that ethnicity, while correlated, did not. None of the findings cited show bias in SASSI scores as a function of subject characteristics. A central theme is that the authors believe the SASSI subtle scales do not add en...

OBJECTIVES Recent years have witnessed a progressive increase in defensive medicine (DM) in several Western welfare countries. In Danish primary and secondary care, documentation on the extent of DM is lacking. Before investigating the extent of DM, we wanted to explore how the phenomenon is understood and experienced in the context of general practice in Denmark. The objective of the study was...

In the South African health care system patients/consumers are divided into those who can afford private care and those who rely on state medical assistance. The system is under pressure to fund delivery of medical care to its beneficiaries. We consider the effects of different funding models on medicolegal liability of health professionals serving the private sector. Medical reasons should det...

The extent and existence of defensive medicine in the face of medical malpractice liability pressure is a perennial subject of both policy and academic debate. In this paper, I investigate the impact of a series of court rulings in Taiwan that increased physicians’ liability risks, and a subsequent amendment to the law that reversed the courts’ rulings, on physicians’ test-ordering behavior and...

The provisions of the andalusian Law on rights and guarantees of the dignity of persons in the process of death, also known as "act of dignified death", are based on two pillars: the right to the autonomy of the patient, supported, if it be, in a will expressed in instructions given in advance and the duties of doctors and health centers to give satisfaction, to the extent of their potential an...

Failure (Study 1) and attachment separation thoughts (Study 2) caused exaggerated consensus estimates for personal beliefs about unrelated social issues. This compensatory consensus effect was most pronounced among defensively proud individuals, that is, among those with the combination of high explicit and low implicit self-esteem (Study 1) and the combination of high attachment avoidance and ...

INTRODUCTION The hidden cost of defensive medicine has been cited by policymakers as a significant driving force in the increase of our nation's health-care costs. If this hypothesis is correct, one would expect that states with higher levels of tort reform will have a decrease in Medicare utilization and that medical utilization will decrease after tort reform is enacted. METHODS State-level...

BACKGROUND Clinical guidelines for single diseases often pose problems in general practice work with multimorbid patients. However, little research focuses on how general practice is affected by the demand to follow multiple guidelines. This study explored Norwegian general practitioners' (GPs') experiences with and reflections upon the consequences for general practice of applying multiple gui...