During Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, President Bush urged Congress to pass medical liability reform. Like the president, Governor Craig Benson has called for medical lawsuit reforms in New Hampshire. The governor is joined by doctors and leading Republicans who say a proposed state law will cut medical insurance bills.
Lawyers emphatically disagree.
N-H-P-R Correspondent John Milne has the story.
Early in his State of the Union address, President Bush said medical lawsuits as a primary cause of rising health costs:
(cut in vault) “To improve our health care system we must address one of the prime causes of higher cost: the constant threat that physicians and hospitals will be unfairly sued. Because of excessive litigation, everybody pays more for health care, and many parts of America are losing fine doctors.”
On the state level, Governor Craig Benson, in his inaugural address, called for a law to overturn a state Supreme Court decision on medical lawsuits.
Benson said new legislation is necessary to keep medical costs low.
(Benson cut)
Like the governor, the House Republican leadership is weighing in on rising malpractice insurance bills. Majority Leader David Hess:
Track 1 2:00
There are dark clouds on the horizon, and one of the dark clouds is the fact that specialties, in particular obstetricians and gynecologists, have seen a meteoric rise in malpractice insurance premiums, which jeopardizes the continued practice of that specialty in rural, less wealthy areas of the state where physicians cannot charge rates sufficient to cover those expenses.
According to Bush administration figures, malpractice insurance premiums for such medical specialists as obstetricians and neurologists are up 50 per cent.
Annual bills are close to one hundred thousand dollars.
The new president of the New Hampshire Medical Society is Doctor Peter Forssell of Peterborough. He said he was pleasantly surprised when the president gave such prominence to the medical liability issue in his address.
Doctor Forssell said that unless the state limits malpractice suits, New Hampshire is in a state of near-crisis.
New Hampshire hasn’t seen strikes and clinics closing as West Virginia did last month.
But Doctor Forssell says these problems are on the way.
Track 1/ 3:02 I believe that there are physicians in the state of New Hampshire that are changing their professional lives, moving from the state of New Hampshire, because of the rising cost of their malpractice premiums.
Not everyone buys this argument.
Trial lawyers – the ones who actually bring the lawsuits – argue that the blame should be laid to politicians and insurance companies.
Paul Maggiotto, president of the New Hampshire Trial Lawyers’ Association, says malpractice suits are risky.
The lawyers take only cases that reveal serious problems in medical treatment, he says.
Track 4/ 1:17: You don’t get frivolous lawsuits in medical malpractice cases. You just don’t see ‘em. Most lawyers like myself who practice in this area, we all do it on a contingency basis, and to take a frivolous lawsuit is going to cost you a small fortune.
And they’re strongly defended. So that’s a misnomer. I don’t see that as the cause, and I don’t believe they’d be able to substantiate it as the cause.
Maggiotto argues that the governor and the leadership are making New Hampshire another target in a national lobbying effort.
Track 5/0:12: This essentially is a national effort by insurance companies who have lobbied the president and Congress extensively to try and put a limit on medical malpractice cases. It has a trickle-down effect to the state, i.e., these national efforts reach out to local states to try and accomplish in local state legislatures what they can’t accomplish maybe on the national scene.
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In New Hampshire, the dispute focuses on a 2001 state Supreme Court ruling.
The justices permitted juries to award damages for “loss of opportunity.”
This legal principle, doctors say, gives juries another chance to award money to an injured party. Doctor Forssell:
Track 2/2:26: The loss of opportunity doctrine is relatively new to the state of New Hampshire. And it has lowered the bar to create higher liability monetary awards which we believe will only drive the cost of medical malpractice insurance up.
Nonsense, says Maggiotto:
Track 4/2:28: The bill that’s been submitted now in the New Hampshire Legislature is a draconian response to a problem that doesn’t exist.
Some lawyers who defend doctors in malpractice suits say they haven’t yet seen a significant change in the number of cases or size of awards.
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Both sides are lining up votes for a major legislative fight that’s already under way.
One battleground will be next week’s hearing on a bill to study medical malpractice issues.
So far, no one expresses any willingness to compromise.
For NHPR news, this is John Milne.
