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Illinois doctors stage insurance protest


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SPRINGFIELD, Illinois (Reuters) -- Doctors from across Illinois left their practices Wednesday in the latest protest against rising liability insurance premiums.

Unlike a strike staged by New Jersey doctors earlier in the month in which some nonemergency care was disrupted, or an earlier action in West Virginia, those involved in the Illinois demonstration said they had arranged to have their patients covered during their day-long trip to the state capital.

About 300 of them, many wearing white or blue lab coats, gathered in the rotunda of the capitol for a mid-day rally and planned to lobby state lawmakers during the afternoon. Others said they did not go to the demonstration but had limited their activities for the day.

Doctors involved in high-risk areas such as obstetrics or neurosurgery can pay as much as $200,000 in annual premiums by some accounts. There have been reports of doctors limiting the kind of work they do or leaving medicine entirely because of the costs.

Premiums across-the-board have been rising because some insurers -- who entered the market during good economic times with low premiums -- are leaving the business or being forced to raise prices in the wake of bad times and rising jury awards in malpractice cases, protest organizers said.

Tom Pliura, a physician and lawyer from LeRoy, Illinois, headed up Wednesday's rally, said "No one single thing is going to kill this beast. We need to work with the insurance industry to identify patterns, recurring episodes of negligence, to educate and train physicians and to train patients on how to avoid negligence.

"We need need educational systems set up and a data collection repository. We need the help of trial lawyers to understand that this is a problem that affects everybody," he said in an interview.

He added that some proposals, such as the limit on punitive awards being discussed in Congress, have no impact in states like Illinois, which have already done away with them in health care cases.



Copyright 2003 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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