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Dr. Sanjay Gupta: Malpractice 'jackpot justice'
(CNN) -- President Bush says that frivolous lawsuits against doctors and hospitals are sending health care costs through the roof. On Thursday, Bush proposed changes in medical liability, including limiting the amount of money juries can award victims of medical malpractice and putting a cap on punitive damages. CNN Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta talked to Bill Hemmer, CNN anchor, about soaring malpractice costs and if the proposed changes would be effective. HEMMER: Sanjay, you heard the president. Where does it stack up? GUPTA: This is a big issue, obviously, near and dear to my heart. The president is certainly outlining a plan to reform medical malpractice. What he is trying to ensure is that doctors don't leave areas with high premiums. (Videotape begins) PRESIDENT BUSH: There are some costs that are unnecessary, as far as I'm concerned. And the problem of those unnecessary costs don't start in the waiting room or the operating room; they're in the courtroom. So you can pretty well blackmail a doctor into settlement if you continue to throw lawsuit after lawsuit, and the system looks like a giant lottery. (Videotape ends) GUPTA: Jackpot justice they call it. About 70 percent, according to a research, of all lawsuits against doctors don't result in any payment at all to the plaintiff, but they are increasing the actual costs of settling one of those lawsuits, about $23,000 per lawsuit. HEMMER: How bad is it then? You deal with this every day. GUPTA: Yes, it is a bad problem. And it's a problem that certainly has gotten worse. ... Certainly some states are worse than others. (States such as) Pennsylvania, West Virginia, we've been hearing a lot about, but also in Georgia, Florida, Ohio, Texas -- a lot of different states are having problems. Let's talk about how much these premiums have gone up over the last year, percentage-wise. Here are some common fields: almost 24.7 percent for internal medicine; for general surgery, it's almost 25 percent; for OB/GYN, it's 19.6 percent. As you know, I'm a neurosurgeon. Let's examine some of the neurosurgery malpractice premiums around the country: It's $267,000 a year to be able to practice neurosurgery in Pennsylvania. That's for malpractice alone. That's how much it costs. Michigan, where I was practicing before, is $120,000, and Georgia, about $70,000. So definitely, a significant problem around the country. HEMMER: What about the specific reforms proposed? How would they work? How would they be effective? GUPTA: That's exactly what the president was talking about yesterday. In part, what his plan is modeled after is a plan that's been in place for California for quite some time. The main focus of this plan is caps: $250,000 cap on noneconomic damages related to a lawsuit, and also caps on punitive damages, and also limits on who can be sued. We are talking about a statute of limitations possibly, in terms of doctors being sued, and we're also talking, in part, about lawyers' fees as well. Those are parts of the plan. This plan has been out there for a while, again, in California, and it's also part of something called the Greenwood Bill. (California's MICRA) law... was passed in 1976. To give you an idea of whether or not it worked, in California, over the last decade or so, the malpractice premiums have gone up about 167 percent, around the rest of the country, about 505 percent.
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