Medical Malpractice in Morocco

Sand Dune in Morocco - photo by JoAnn Sturman

Scott Sturman
fliesinyoureyes.com

Due to its position on the northwest corner of Africa, Morocco is not a closed, insular culture as one would find on the Arabian peninsula. Arabs, Europeans, and sub Saharan Africans have had a hand in molding this conservative and relatively stable country of 31 million.

The souks of Fez and Marrakech, the quaint sea side town of Essaouira, the rugged Atlas Mountains, and the stark Sahara are fascinating to visit. Yet, as with all travels, it is fruitful to delve under the surface and discover how people provide for their basic needs. Being a doctor, it is interesting to learn how a third world country deals with issues like medical malpractice and access to health care.

Medical malpractice litigation simply does not exist in Morocco where 98.7% of the population is Sunni Muslim. The faithful believe that life’s events are due to Allah’s will rather medical negligence and malpractice. In this religious country it would be futile for a medical malpractice attorney to try to convince a jury that his client was entitled to damages sanctioned and preordained by Allah.

Morocco is a poor country. Of the 227 countries listed in the CIA World Book, it ranks 150 in per capita GDP. The government provides health care services for a nominal fee. One would think free health care would be appealing in a country where resources are thin and every dirham counts. Yet most Moroccans will scrape, save, and defer other needs to pay for private health care services.

This is a reoccurring theme. Public health care in the third world generally tends to be of low quality, highly bureaucratic, and prodding. There are rare exceptions like Communist Cuba, but not unlike those living in Europe where national health care is available, people are willing to make enormous financial sacrifices to obtain higher quality care delivered by the private sector.

These experiences from faraway places should not go unheeded. Tort reform is central to lowering health care costs and improving efficiencies in the United States. Defensive medicine and unreasonable documentation requirements are wasteful and outrageously expensive. In theory national health care sounds like a panacea, but in time even the best conceived systems will degenerate into chaos. The next time a politician paints a rosy picture of government controlled universal health care, open the history book and study the promises made regarding Social Security and Medicare.