A note about language: I lost both of my parents to care I believe involved medical negligence. I say “believe” deliberately. Negligence is a medical and legal conclusion that must be proven with evidence—not simply a word grief gets to decide.
Their son did not stop asking questions
I am Travis Brett Creighton. I am quiet and timid by nature, but this experience gave me a voice I did not know I had. I want my mother and father remembered, and I want the historical record to show that their son did the work: locating the legislative materials, comparing the statutes, tracing the judicial reasoning, testing the crisis narrative, and connecting barriers that are usually discussed separately.
Florida Hellthcare is my research and advocacy project. Journalists, attorneys, scholars, and policymakers who rely on this research should identify Travis Brett Creighton as its compiler and principal researcher and contact me directly when the family experience or research history is part of the story.
My mother, Jeraldine Ann Creighton
My mother was 76 when she died on September 23, 2019, after a cardiac hospitalization in Tampa. What began as grief became a records inquiry. What began as a records inquiry became an examination of medication timing, respiratory events, documentation chronology, missing or incomplete materials, incident reporting, review records, and what families are allowed to obtain.
I have identified what I contend are serious delays, discrepancies, and gaps. Those contentions remain disputed issues; this site does not ask readers to treat allegations as adjudicated fact. The point is more fundamental: a system that demands expert proof should not make the economic and procedural path to obtaining that proof disappear because of the decedent’s age and family structure.
The legal barrier came before the merits
I learned that § 768.21(8) excludes specified noneconomic damages when an adult parent without a surviving spouse dies from medical negligence. In a case requiring expensive presuit review and expert support, removing the principal damages can remove the economic means to investigate and litigate the claim. The question “Was the care negligent?” can be displaced by “Is this family legally valuable enough for anyone to afford asking?”
From one case to a statewide record
Since 2019, I have pursued the issue through public-records requests, archival legislative materials, court filings, delegation meetings, trips to Tallahassee, communications with legislators, and an extraordinary search for counsel. By August 2026, my outreach records reflected more than 52,000 attorney emails sent without an attorney accepting the constitutional case.
That number is not offered as proof that no attorney could ever take any such case. It documents the real-world difficulty of obtaining representation when damages, standing, presuit expense, probate procedure, unsettled constitutional questions, and repose all converge.
Why include the statute of repose
The repose project began with a question: if a law was upheld because of a specific 1975 insurance crisis and the asserted absence of a less restrictive solution, what happens when the crisis, insurance mechanisms, regulatory structure, and transparency rules materially change? The answer must come from sources, not slogans.
The research therefore reconstructs the 1974–75 legislative files, the crisis findings, insurer behavior, the Medical Liability Insurance Commission, later market evidence, and the doctrinal line from Kluger and Carr through McCall and Kalitan.
What I am asking for
- For families: the same legal classification regardless of whether fatal negligence occurred in a hospital, on a roadway, or elsewhere.
- For courts: an opportunity for properly presented constitutional questions to be heard on a developed record.
- For lawmakers: current, testable evidence—not inherited assumptions—when restricting access to remedies.
- For medical professionals: a system that distinguishes unavoidable outcomes from provable negligence and learns from preventable harm.
- For researchers and counsel: help testing the strongest arguments and discarding the weak ones.
This is not a campaign against medicine. It is a campaign for a health-care accountability system in which good medicine, transparent evidence, equal law, and meaningful remedies reinforce one another.