LegalCare: It is Time to Lower Legal Costs and Ensure Affordable, Accessible Legal Coverage for All by Matthew S. Rice, M. D., Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, AAPS

According to the American Bar Association, thousands of innocent working Americans are wrongfully convicted of crimes every year, in part due to negligent or poorly trained lawyers, careless judges, and prosecutorial misconduct. Samuel R. Gross, Professor of Law at University of Michigan, estimates that between 3.3 percent and 7 percent of convictions are erroneous, meaning that between 60,000 and 140,000 innocent Americans are incarcerated.

With attorney-legislators scrutinizing and planning the reform of medicine and the health insurance industry, it is only fitting that physicians apply the most current progressive healthcare reform principles to the legal profession. Attorney-legislators and other politicians and appointees are strongly encouraged to use the present healthcare reform momentum to simultaneously reform the legal profession. Doing so would greatly add to their credibility among constituents and other stakeholders, since they know essentially nothing about medicine and everything about law. Legal reform: it is time.
Read the entire Legalcare proposal at www.jpands.org/vol14no4/rice.pdf.

Matthew S. Rice, M.D. is a family physician in Tacoma, Wash. Contact:

matthew_s_rice@yahoo.com. Also see www.SinglePayerLegal.org.

© The Association of the American Physicians and Surgeons, Jane M Orient, MD, Executive Director, Managing Editor; Winter issue of JAPS, Lawrence R Huntoon, MD, PhD, Editor-in-Chief, editor@Jpands.org