Time to create malpractice stability
One of the ways President Obama reached out to Republicans in his State of the Union address Tuesday was to declare a willingness to find common ground on medical malpractice laws.
He said he was willing to consider medical malpractice reform “to rein in frivolous lawsuits.”
Republicans, Democrats, lawyers and doctors should take him up on that invitation. Indeed, new Sen. Mark Kirk, a Highland Park Republican who just was named to a health care-related committee, could reach out to senior Sen. Dick Durbin, a Springfield Democrat, and the two of them could get the talking going in the White House and Capitol Hill. Damage caps are one specific area where health care costs could be controlled and some stability could be injected into the lawsuit landscape nationwide.
Let us be clear: if a doctor, surgeon or health care practitioner is found to have made a mistake that hurts someone, or worse, contributes to someone’s death, they should be made to compensate for that error and cover the costs associated with it. But a uniform ceiling on those costs should be created nationwide.
As it stands now, we have a patchwork approach to medical malpractice lawsuits. Illinois, Iowa and Kentucky are among the states that have no cap on monetary damages for pain and suffering in medical malpractice cases. For more than two decades now in Illinois, that lack of a cap has been a point of contention battled first in the Capitol and then at the state Supreme Court. An attempt at caps ended up being rejected by the state’s top court. Yet, other states have managed to craft laws that allow for caps. According to a recent report by Daily Herald Staff Writer Larissa Chinwah, Indiana has a $250,000 pain and suffering cap, Michigan has a $280,000 cap, but Wisconsin has a $750,000 cap.
The patchwork approach creates a crazy quilt of instability. Is, for instance, the amputation of a wrong leg worth more in Wisconsin than Indiana? As it currently stands, it could be, but it shouldn’t be that way. And the variance in caps shouldn’t be factored in by some doctors and lawyers when they are deciding where to practice.
The medical liability environment landed in the middle of a list of things new doctors said they consider when they are deciding in which state they will practice medicine. Not surprisingly, some health care professionals say increasing insurance rates in Illinois and the lack of damage caps is of great concern to them.
When a mistake as grave as a medical one is made, someone should be held responsible. We urge Kirk, Durbin and others to work with Obama on a uniform compromise applied nationwide. But in case that effort fails, Illinois legislators also should work again to create reasonable caps here that will stand up in court. Illinois should not remain a place where medical practitioners who want to heal cannot find a stable home.