CNN/PAULA ZAHN NOW SHOW ON MEDICAL MALPRACTICE

Transcript:


Zahn: Who can put a price on...pain and suffering?...
[W]e're taking a close look at one of the president's
major goals, cutting down on medical malpractice
lawsuits, a step he says that will help control the
high cost of health care. But what about people who
have been harmed by medical blunders? Critics says
the president's ignores the pain and suffering of
those people. Once again, senior legal analyst
Jeffrey Toobin."


Toobin: "For five years, Tony and Susie Zionkowski
tried to have a baby. Then they got a surprise, twins.
Susie's pregnancy was normal and so was the delivery
of their daughter, Lucy (ph). Not so the other twin,
Lily."


S. Zionkowski: "I don't think most people have
doctors in there screaming for help. And they were
all pushing. I can feel elbows on my throat, they're
all pushing so hard. People are on the table. And I
can hear nurses crying. So I think that you
definitely - there's no doubt, it was chaos. It was
mass chaos."


Toobin: "Lily was finally delivered by emergency
C-section. Her brain was deprived of oxygen for so
long that she had to be revived....Lily has seizures
every day....She must be carefully fed. The cost of
Lily's day-to-day care is astonishing. Her medication
alone is $1,000 a month....When the girls were still
infants, Tony and Susie struggled to figure out what
happened to Lily. After they looked at the medical
records, they felt that many mistakes had been made.
Then they made a difficult decision, to sue for
damages."


S. ZIONKOWSKI: "As a mother, you just - it changes
your whole mind-set. Before, I may have been a person
that said, you know, if anybody asked me if I was
going to sue someone in my lifetime, I would have
said, slim to none; I don't believe in it."

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CNN.com, 02/02/2005

For complete transcript, see TARGET="_blank">http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0502/02/pzn.01.html

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