Doctors and the dissenter

Wednesday, November 19, 2003

By all accounts, doctors at Christ Hospital in Jersey City thought Dr. George Ciechanowski was a good physician and an excellent medical staff president.

They thought so until he offered a second opinion contrary to the Medical Society of New Jersey's claim that there is one and only one cure for high malpractice premiums: a limit on what juries can award patients for pain and suffering.

The Christ Hospital medical staff voted Ciechanowski out of office, seven months before his term was up. His colleagues made no bones about the reason. It was retribution because Ciechanowski took a public position against malpractice caps and the doctors' effort to oust the legislators who refused to vote for caps. His colleagues said Ciechanowski sided with the lawyers.

If hospital medical staffs moved as quickly against bad doctors as this bunch moved against Ciechanowski, there might not be a malpractice problem.

Without mentioning the hospital, his position there or the medical society, Ciechanowski wrote a letter supporting an Assembly plan to subsidize doctors having problems with high malpractice premiums as a better idea than caps.

A group called Consumers for Civil Justice used his letter to counter the doctors' campaign. Consumers for Civil Justice is made up of several organizations working for insurance reform of all kinds: the AARP, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, New Jersey Citizen Action and Physicians and Patients for Quality Care, to which Ciechanowski belongs.

This episode illustrates the extent to which physicians have shut their ears to everything but the propaganda the insurance industry feeds them, including the notion that the issue is simply one of trial lawyers vs. doctors.

The doctors should be asking why the companies that were only recently undercutting each other's malpractice premiums are now squeezing the doctors dry. They should ask why the industry has yet to present figures to show what is actually paid out for pain and suffering. Instead of asking the questions a profession based on science should, the doctors have blindly pursued the remedy they were told to go fetch.

They might want to keep doctors like Ciechanowski around to infuse their sad old arguments with some new life because the cap effort is a dead duck in this state. The doctors bought that result with a failed $2 million campaign to unseat the Assembly Democrats who did not support caps. Those legislators won, they are back and they are not pleased. In many districts, doctors donned white coats and stethoscopes and went door to door trying to turn votes against those lawmakers.

Some doctors brought the campaign into their waiting rooms, lobbying patients who had come for treatment. That, like the strike the doctors staged earlier this year, was a far worse transgression than anything Ciechanowski did.

We think the Legislature should concentrate on solutions to malpractice, not political revenge, even though revenge is what the doctors went for when they lined up against Ciechanowski. A taste of their own medicine may be justified, but fixing the malpractice problem has to come first.