Tort Bar Bonanza

January 10, 2005; Page A12
WSJ REVIEW & OUTLOOK

"As President Bush pushes for national tort reform, Maryland
Democrats have a plan to take money out of taxpayers' pockets and put
it in the hands of tort lawyers.

They are calling it medical malpractice reform, but the bill that
passed the state legislature and is now before the Republican
Governor would be better labeled the Tort Lawyer Enrichment Act. It's
also a harbinger of the kind of fight brewing in Congress.

Maryland, like most other states, is facing skyrocketing health care
costs thanks in part to frivolous lawsuits. To head off malpractice
insurance premiums that went up an average 33% on January 1, Governor
Robert Ehrlich called a special legislative session after Christmas
in hopes of passing reforms that would limit damage awards, make it
harder to sue emergency room doctors and stop the practice of using a
hospital's expression of apology as an admission of guilt.

The Governor also wanted to set up a temporary fund that would, until
other reforms took root, help offset part of the increase in
malpractice premiums.

The Democratic-controlled legislature watered down the reforms but
then jumped on creating a special fund to pay doctors' medical
malpractice premiums for them.

To pay for the new fund, the legislature handed Governor Ehrlich a
bill that would impose a new 2% tax on HMOs at an estimated cost of
$430 million over four years.

This is reform only in the sense that it takes the burden of rising
premiums off the shoulders of doctors.

Governor Ehrlich has scheduled a veto ceremony for today, saying that
the bill does nothing to address the underlying problem of the tort
bar raising the cost of health care for everyone.

The new tax would quickly be passed onto consumers and an estimated
one million Marylanders would end up paying more for their health
insurance. So much for trying to shrink the ranks of the uninsured.

The Democrats' aim here is to take the political heat off of a
legislature that has been beset by angry doctors for most of the past
year. Putting doctors on the government dole will make them beholden
to the legislators who keep the checks coming.

Doctors who do not pay their full malpractice premiums will have less
incentive to push for tort reform that will stop the lawsuits that
drive up those premiums in the first place.

That will leave patients without one of their strongest political
allies in lobbying for common sense reforms. We've already seen a
hint of this when the Maryland State Medical Society and the Maryland
Hospital Association endorsed the legislature's proposal last week.

All of this is a long way from the reforms Maryland needs to make
health care affordable.

Trial lawyers aren't going to stop waging legal warfare on the health
care industry until it's no longer profitable to do so. That day
isn't brought any closer by creating a special tax to make sure the
tort bar can continue to wring money from the system.

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