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Allowing Patients To Waive The Right To Sue For Medical Malpractice: A Response To Thaler And Sunstein, Tom Baker, Timothy D. Lytton Jan 2010

Allowing Patients To Waive The Right To Sue For Medical Malpractice: A Response To Thaler And Sunstein, Tom Baker, Timothy D. Lytton

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay critically evaluates Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s proposal to allow patients to prospectively waive their rights to bring a malpractice claim, presented in their recent, much acclaimed book, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness. We show that the behavioral insights that undergird Nudge do not support the waiver proposal. In addition, we demonstrate that Thaler and Sunstein have not provided a persuasive cost-benefit justification for the proposal. Finally, we argue that their liberty-based defense of waivers rests on misleading analogies and polemical rhetoric that ignore the liberty and other interests served by patients’ tort law rights. …


Recalibrating The Legal Risks Of Cross-Border Health Care, Nathan Cortez Jan 2010

Recalibrating The Legal Risks Of Cross-Border Health Care, Nathan Cortez

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The nascent scholarship surrounding "medical tourism" assumes, without much scrutiny, that foreign jurisdictions provide few legal remedies to patients, instead focusing on whether U.S. patients can sue in U.S. courts. This article tests that assumption by examining whether patients might recover adequate compensation not only in the United States, but in four common destinations: India, Thailand, Singapore, and Mexico. I analyze how each jurisdiction handles medical malpractice complaints and discuss the unique obstacles patients might face when navigating each of these systems. I conclude that U.S. patients will struggle to recover remotely adequate compensation in each of these jurisdictions. This …