Posted on Wed, Apr. 09, 2003
Doctors call for caps on malpractice awards
Lawyers suggest doctors exaggerate role of suits in insurance premiums
MIKE STOBBE
Staff Writer
RALEIGH - Thousands of doctors and medical professionals swarmed the state capitol Tuesday, in a large-scale
lobbying effort to push for new limits on medical malpractice jury awards.
Close to 3,000 showed up for meetings with legislators and for a 1 p.m. rally in a plaza outside legislative office
buildings, organizers said. Some lawmakers were impressed by the showing.
"I can't remember, in the 10 years I've served, ever seeing a crowd this large on the plaza," said state Sen. David
Hoyle, D- Gastonia.
It was organized medicine's most concerted effort to date to push for caps of $250,000 on "pain and suffering" and
other forms of noneconomic damages in medical malpractice cases.
The lack of caps is allowing increasingly large jury verdicts, which drive up the cost of medical malpractice
insurance, which is becoming a crushing blow to physicians, doctors said.
Doctors in certain high-risk specialties have seen insurance premiums rise about 30 percent in each of the last two
years. N.C. obstetricians now average premium costs of $100,000 a year, doctors said.
Hospitals have seen even larger jumps -- Novant Health, the corporate parent of Charlotte's Presbyterian Hospital,
reports its malpractice insurance costs rose 114 percent between 2000 and 2003, to $4.5 million.
It's causing a crisis, which could soon cause significant numbers of doctors to retire or leave the state, doctors said.
They blame trial lawyers, both for the high jury verdicts and for lobbying efforts against the caps.
"We're trying to stop an absolute raping of the system by lawyers," said Dr. David Newman, a Charlotte
obstetrician.
The trial lawyers, meanwhile, pointed to a report released Monday by Public Citizen, a Washington, D.C.-based
consumer group that estimates between 1,200 and 2,800 N.C. deaths occur each year due to medical mistakes.
"How do you improve that situation? Not by reducing doctors' accountability," said Billy Warden, a spokesman for
the N.C. Academy of Trial Lawyers, who was at the rally.
Warden's group also noted another report released this week by Americans for Insurance Reform, a New
York-based coalition of consumer and public interest groups.
That report said jury verdicts and settlements rose at about the same rate as medical inflation over the last 18
years, but insurance premiums fluctuated more dramatically. The problem is the economy and its impact on
insurers' bottom lines, the study found.
On Tuesday, doctors criticized Public Citizen's estimates of medical mistakes as faulty, and said AIR's conclusions
were flat-out wrong.
Medical Mutual Insurance, one of the state's largest providers of medical malpractice insurance, has doubled
insurance premiums for all doctors over the past five years, said Dr. Chris Teigland, a Charlotte urologist who sits
on the insurer's board of directors.
But that wasn't because of the stock market. The organization saw investment gains of 4.5 percent in the past three
years. "The problem is the claims have gotten outlandish," he said.
The General Assembly is considering two jury award-capping bills, and the fierce back-and-forth between the
doctors and lawyers is expected to continue.
It's becoming a spectacle. Tuesday's rally cost at least $60,000, and involved about 50 rented buses, thousands of box lunches and leased space for a staging area at the RBC Center, a hockey arena west of downtown Raleigh. It was co-sponsored by the N.C. Medical Society, the N.C. Hospital Association and the N.C. Health Care Facilities Association.