Political Quotes

“I want to continue on with some of the comments I was making earlier about the critical situation in Pennsylvania with respect to this liability crisis and a couple of examples of how out of control the system has become. I was at St. Luke's Hospital up in the Lehigh Valley, and I was saddened by the changes that have happened with some of the losses of physicians that have occurred in there. It is one of the growing areas of our State, and this is an area that has been hit with very high rates of malpractice and obviously, as I will discuss here, losing physicians. I want to talk about a couple of things. One is a case that St. Luke's was involved in that tells you how absurd, and particularly in this case, the jury awards are in Philadelphia, which has been the big problem area in Pennsylvania--some of the jury awards that have come out of Philadelphia. We had a case in September and October of the year 2000 which involved a baby girl born 3 months premature to a 17-year-old mother whose medical records indicated a crack cocaine addiction. The mother began experiencing complications, including a partial placental abruption and premature labor. The mother was admitted to another hospital for these complications and then transferred to St. Luke's. The mother was placed on strict bed rest and given medication to stop the onset of labor and to prevent progression of the placental abruption.…”