Posted on 05/14/2003 4:30:31 AM PDT by ZULU
Doctors riled up for rally in Trenton By Chris Gosier, Daily Record
Three months after rallying in Trenton to protest the high cost of malpractice insurance, doctors say the Legislature is still failing to address the problem. So they're going back on Thursday.
"Doctors are becoming extremely frustrated by the inaction of the Assembly" on a bill that would cap noneconomic damages awarded by juries to injured patients, said Irvin Bonder, a Denville urologist and president of the Morris County Medical Society, which is helping organize the one-day rally by doctors around the state.
"The longer we wait, the more doctors are going to go out of practice," he said.
Doctors have been arguing for months that excessive jury awards are forcing doctors out of state or out of the profession by driving up the cost of malpractice insurance.
Thursday's rally in Trenton is meant to prompt action on an Assembly bill that would cap the insurer's payment at $300,000 for noneconomic damages such as pain and suffering. The plaintiff could appeal to a state fund for another $700,000 above that in some cases. There would be no cap on economic costs, such as continuing medical care stemming from an injury.
The Medical Society of New Jersey, which is organizing the rally, says many independent studies show that caps are needed to bring down insurance costs. But their solutions are opposed by influential lawmakers who say there is too little evidence that high jury awards are the source of the problem.
The cap "is an artificial, made-up number which denies people access to the courts," said Neil Cohen, D-Union, chairman of the Assembly Banking and Insurance Committee and deputy majority leader.
"It's been held unconstitutional in many states, and there's no reason to limit peoples' return if they've got a case that a jury or a settlement says should be (a certain) amount of money," he said.
Thursday's demonstration will last only one day, unlike the Feb. 3 job action that lasted for weeks in some parts of the state, with many doctors on call for emergencies but otherwise deferring all nonurgent care.
Buses will be leaving early Thursday from Morris County hospitals, where extra emergency room staffing was being planned. At Morristown Memorial Hospital, 135 of the 1,136 visiting doctors had signed up by Tuesday evening.
St. Clare's had about 70 signed up. Eighty-two doctors had signed on at Newton Memorial Hospital, out of 220 on staff, spokesman Brian Grace said.
Ninety doctors had signed up at Chilton Memorial Hospital, where a spokeswoman said the hospital supports the doctors' cause. The spokeswoman, Alexandra Nolan, said hospitals also are facing steep increases in malpractice insurance -- 61 percent this year at Chilton, even though the number of claims is unchanged.
"As you can imagine, increases like that force hospitals to cut costs in other areas of their budgets and could have serious ramifications for other patients in the future," she said.
The Legislature is considering other measures besides the $300,000 cap. One proposal is a prelawsuit screening process to eliminate the doctors who don't need to be named in a lawsuit because their involvement in the incident was minor. Also, no claim would be filed with a doctor's insurer if the doctor is jettisoned from the case within 180 days.
Another proposal would fund 50 percent of the premium increases for doctors in high-risk specialties -- such as surgeons and obstetricians -- over five years.
Assemblywoman Loretta Weinberg, D-Teaneck, majority conference leader and chair of the Health and Human Services Committee, said that's preferable to setting up a state fund to cover jury awards above the $300,000 cap.
"Our version of the bill uses the same money and gives immediate premium relief to doctors," she said.
She said data from the state Administrative Office of the Courts show no big increase in jury awards, and that the number of malpractice cases has dropped.
She favors a proposed commission that could subpoena insurance companies to find out if huge settlements are the real culprit in the malpractice insurance crisis.
"There's a lot of missing information here" that the Legislature must obtain before deciding whether to cap jury awards, she said.
An official with the state medical society countered that jury awards would still need to be capped because they influence the amount sought in settlements.
"When you get a high jury award … that, then, becomes the standard by which everything else is judged," said Ray Cantor, the society's director of governmental affairs. "It doesn't take a lot of those cases to really drive up the rates for everyone."
Mr. Neil Cohen, ESQ. is an attorney. Since there are far more attorneys than any other profession represented in the New Jersey State Legislature, it is hardly surprising these social parasits are not receptive to any measures which reduce the flow of cash into their already overfilled pockets.
Lawyers are a plague and a pox on the social landscape. As officers of the court, the have are tied up in an incestuous union with the Courts. Accordingly, they should be BANNED from holding any position in the legislature. This problem is but one sample of the impact of this continuing POX on the body politic.
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