Doctor Loses Bid to Pull Report That Says He Left Mid-Surgery

An allegedly erroneous report that said a California doctor left the operating room during open-heart surgery isn’t the reason he’s unable to practice medicine, according to the Ninth Circuit.

After the California Department of Public Health published a report in 2012 without interviewing the doctors involved in the surgery, Dr. Pervaiz Chaudhry sued to have it withdrawn as a violation of his due process rights. But Chaudhry can’t practice medicine because multiple malpractice lawsuits have made the mandatory insurance coverage unaffordable—lawsuits that likely would have been filed even without the state report, Judge Gary S. Katzmann said on Tuesday.

He ...