Central New York Injury Lawyer Blog

New York dental malpractice lawyers agree on one thing: You have to turn down most calls about dental malpractice. Most alleged dental malpractice cases are going nowhere. We get calls from people all the time. They got a bad result from their dentistry work, and they want to sue. But usually the bad result was a “known risk” of the procedure. When it’s a known risk, usually there’s no case. Sometimes there really was dental negligence, but then the injury is too small to really warrant a dental malpractice lawsuit. Getting a case with provable negligence, plus a significant injury, well, that doesn’t happen every day.

But a case I read about in the Syracuse Post Standard this week is more than just a dental malpractice case. I would describe it as a dental assault and battery case. It’s a god-awful story about ten Syracuse-area families who sued a dental clinic, “Small Smiles”, alleging their children had been subjected to unnecessary dental treatment, and without anesthesia.

That last part kills me. Imagine having your kids subjected to dental torture, and for no good medical reason? Can you say, “Marathon Man“? If these allegations are true, and apparently they are (Small Smiles’ national parent corporation settled with the Federal Government for $24 Million for Medicaid fraud based on the same facts) the case might well warrant punitive damages, which is all but unheard of in medical or dental malpractice cases.

My outrage at New York doctors and hospitals, who recently tried to sneak into our State budget a booby-trap to explode on their unsuspecting malpracticed patients, has still not subsided. Read my recent blogs about their underhanded efforts here and here. Readers’ digest version: They tried to slip a “cap on non-economic damages” for medical malpractice lawsuits into our State budget. Fortunately, their efforts failed. But believe me, New York medical doctors’ lobbyists will try it again. Their motto is, “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again”.

So forgive me if I rant a while longer. They will keep at it, so why shouldn’t I?

New York doctors and hospitals keep whining about skyrocketing insurance premiums, which they choose to blame not on greedy insurance companies, but on New York malpractice claimants and their New York medical malpractice lawyers. But when juries hammer doctors with big verdicts, it’s because the doctors hammered their patients with big harm — carelessly. Juries reluctantly bang out big verdicts to compensate big screw ups. Those juries have found the doctors’ treatment of their patient so pathetic – wait, let’s be generous — “crappy” – as to fall below any acceptable standard of medical care.

New York Medical malpractice victims, you might not know it, but you just dodged a bullet! The New York hospital and physician lobby just tried to cut the legs off your rights to compensation. They tried to get the governor to incorporate into his budget a provision that would have capped all medical malpractice pain and suffering verdicts at $250,000. I already blogged about the unfairness of such a rule.

Good news: The doctor lobby failed! The final budget, which has now become law, tossed out the ill-conceived medical malpractice cap. And that is cause for celebration, not only by New York medical malpractice lawyers, but also by New York medical malpractice victims and their families.

Turns out the doctors and hospitals are poor losers. In a letter from Medical Society of the State of New York President Dr. Leah McCormack to his fellow doctors, he says he is “more than disappointed” that the budget did not include the cap. He feels “angry, disgusted and betrayed”.