Before term limits soon end his six years as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, convened a field hearing Friday at the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City to rally one last drive to limit malpractice awards against doctors and hospitals.
Key arguments for and against were demonstrated by personal stories of two Utah witnesses — a surgeon forced into retirement by escalating malpractice insurance costs and a mom whose 3-year-old son faces a lifetime of expensive health care and suffering after he was left a quadriplegic, blind and tube-fed because of doctor negligence.
Salt Lake neurosurgeon Dr. J. Charles Rich testified that last year, at age 66, he wanted to reduce his practice. However, with malpractice insurance premiums of $82,000 a year, "I could either practice full tilt in order to afford the increasingly high practice overhead or not practice at all. There was no feasible way to slow down. I stopped medical practice."
Rich noted that only 27 practicing neurosurgeons remain in Utah and that hospitals find it difficult to cover needs with so few. Some surgeons are referring higher-risk brain and spine cases to distant medical centers.
Hatch added that many doctors have stopped delivering babies because of insurance premiums driven up by malpractice lawsuits, leaving more women with inadequate or distant care. "Utah physicians practicing obstetrics and gynecology have to deliver about 60 babies a year just to cover the standard insurance rate in 2003 of $71,000," he said.
In contrast, Karla Glodowski of Lehi opposes limiting malpractice awards because of what happened two years ago to her now 3-year-old son, Christopher. During surgery to reattach a severed fingertip, she said, inattentive doctors allowed her asthmatic son to suffer a bronchial spasm that led to severe oxygen deprivation and brain damage.
"Now he is quadriplegic and suffers from cortical blindness. He cannot eat normally and must receive his nutrition through a tube in his stomach," she said. She added that doctors did not initially disclose errors to her and that handwriting experts said her son's medical charts had been altered in an attempt to avoid liability.
She settled a lawsuit, with conditions requiring that the amount of the award and doctors involved not be disclosed. "I cannot fathom the thought of anyone thinking that putting a cap on the amount awarded to families who have been victimized by malpractice will solve anything. In my eyes it is an attempt to victimize the innocent even further," she said.
Hatch is pushing to limit "non-economic" malpractice awards for claims such as pain and suffering to $250,000. He favors still allowing unlimited economic awards to cover past and future medical costs, lost wages and assisted-living expenses.
Bills to do so were filibustered by Democrats earlier this year. Hatch and his allies were unable to muster the three-fifths majority needed to cut off that talk-a-thon. However, Hatch says he has the simple majority needed to enact the reform. Hatch worried aloud that "Senate inaction may derail reform and allow this liability crisis to continue unabated."
Hatch and a parade of doctors and hospital administrators told the gathering that without limits on lawsuit awards quickly, more doctors will be driven out of high-risk areas such as obstetrics, and medical costs will rise as doctors order tests and procedures that likely are not necessary except to better protect them in a lawsuit.
John C. Nelson, a Salt Lake obstetrician and president of the American Medical Association, called the situation a crisis, with "patients having to leave their state to receive urgent surgical care, pregnant women who cannot find an obstetrician to monitor their pregnancy and deliver their babies," and health centers closing because of liability concerns.
Salt Lake attorney Charles Thronson said no such crisis exists and that capping awards would hurt victims he represents. He said malpractice filings decreased nationally by 1 percent between 1998 and 2002. He said malpractice payments dropped 7.7 percent from 2001 to 2002.
"There has never, ever in the history of the state of Utah been a medical malpractice verdict that could by any stretch of the imagination be called a runaway verdict," he said, "yet that is not what doctors or patients or the public is being told."
E-mail: lee@desnews.com