If you listen to the Florida Medical Association’s leadership, the greatest crisis facing doctors is that their medical malpractice insurance premiums are too high. To fix the crisis, the misguided leadership at the FMA is proposing a constitutional amendment to limit the amount malpractice victims can pay their attorneys. The FMA leadership claims that doing this will lower malpractice insurance premiums. They’re wrong and they know it.

Amendment 3 will not:

Reduce malpractice premiums;
Eliminate frivolous lawsuits; or
Prevent bad and dangerous doctors from practicing medicine.
Amendment 3 will:

Undermine the safety and effectiveness of health care in Florida;
Severely restrict the malpractice victims’ constitutional guarantee to access Florida courts; and
Force taxpayers to pick up the tab for malpractice victims no longer able to provide for themselves or their families due to lost wages and life-long medical care.
We should change our constitution to give patients and victims more rights, not fewer.

The FMA leadership has fooled many good and conscientious doctors into believing that Amendment 3 will help victims and their families. Amendment 3 will make it nearly impossible to punish irresponsible and incompetent doctors. This will be an invitation to the worst doctors in the nation to come to Florida where they will be able to escape punishment for their deadly mistakes.

This amendment does nothing to control soaring health care costs, stop waste or eliminate fraud. Moreover, it does nothing to reduce frivolous lawsuits. This is why Florida Supreme Court Justice Fred Lewis called the amendment, “Truly a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

The special interests behind Amendment 3 claim it will give victims of medical malpractice a “fair share” – its real aim is to make sure victims
never receive a share at all.

Amendment 3:

BAD FOR PATIENTS

Makes it nearly impossible for victims of medical errors to find a lawyer – even when a patient is killed or paralyzed.

Will result in a devastating increase in medical injuries, which already claims up to 5400 lives in Florida each year.

WILL COST YOU HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS A YEAR

Medical errors force each family in Florida an average of $517 dollars a year more in health care related costs, while those responsible for these errors get off scot-free.

Amendment 3 will make this even worse — That means higher insurance rates and higher health care costs for all Floridians.
A GIFT TO INSURANCE COMPANIES & HMOs THAT TAKES AWAY YOUR RIGHTS

Changes the Medical Liability System so that your right to hold the healthcare system accountable for a life-threatening medical error is virtually wiped out.

Makes the Medical Liability System even worse by giving insurance companies even more of an unfair advantage over average citizens in Florida’s legal system.

The California-based Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, a leading citizen research and advocacy group on insurance and tort issues, concluded that Amendment 3 would:

• “Encourage reckless and dangerous conduct by health care providers, particularly HMOs and incompetent or irresponsible medical staff, thus having a devastating effect on the safety of Florida patients.”

• “Dramatically interfere with the right of Floridians to hire a lawyer to protect them in a dispute with a doctor, hospital or other health care provider, to the point where only the wealthy will be able to hire an attorney.”

• “Not lower the price of medical malpractice insurance premiums.”

• “Result in increased taxes for Floridians as they are forced to absorb the medical and other uncompensated expenses of victims of medical malpractice.”

The analysis also noted that a possible drafting error could require that Amendment 3 be applied to all lawsuits in which the injured person requests compensation for medical bills, not solely to medical malpractice lawsuits, as has been advertised.

Amendment 3 is sponsored by the leadership of the Florida medical lobby, which, like its counterparts in many other states, has sought to restrict the rights of patients harmed by medical malpractice to seek compensation from health care providers.

Harvey Rosenfield, founder of the organization and author of a voter-approved ballot measure that lowered malpractice premiums in California by regulating insurance company rates and profits, stated: “We conclude that Amendment 3 will lead directly to the death and injury of Floridians at the hands of HMOs and incompetent medical staff. It will lower health care quality, raise costs to taxpayers and do nothing to lower insurance premiums for the state’s doctors.”

Noting that a recent study by Health Grades Inc. found that medical malpractice contributed to the deaths of almost 200,000 Americans a year in hospitals alone, Rosenfield concluded that “Amendment 3 is a prescription for disaster for Floridians.”

For starters, you say that “physicians should cap their own fees”, utterly oblivious to the fact that their fees are ALREADY being capped from without, by third party payors, whether they like it or not. No similar situation exists for you and your ilk.

Grab a clue, and grow a brain; while I wait for you to do so, I’ll be content in the knowledge that the VAST majority of the American public would– in full view of the facts– support physicians over lawyers any day.

Capping attorney fees to save costs in the provision of medical care? Here’s an idea – doctors should volunteer to have their own fees capped first – something that would bring down medical costs much faster than “malpractice reform” – and if they like the result *then* they can advocate capping the fees of other professionals. A non-starter? That’s what I thought. Yet the attorney fee capping proposal would have absolutely *no* impact on medical costs – it’s pure spite, isn’t it?

As for the “Chicken Little” notion that sanctioning doctors with three malpractice *verdicts* against them would be tantamount to driving out of practice any doctor who has been *sued* three times, surely you jest. There is a world of difference between being sued and having a malpractice verdict entered against you. The former requires the preparation of a complaint and the payment of a filing fee. The latter requires a victory at trial, which is anything but a given in a medical malpractice case. Arguably, unless there are safeguards not described, the worst doctors will be somewhat shielded from the effects of this rule as they would settle on terms which require dismissal of the underlying lawsuit.

The primary reason doctors conceal the results of internal investigations and peer review, IMHO, is not to protect candor, or to ensure a more objective proceeding, but is to prevent their findings of culpability from being used in litigation. It must horrify medical malpratice lawyers, not only that such findings would pretty much seal an adverse verdict or settlement, but that the public would get an idea of the true scale of medical negligence and how few indicents of malpractice actually result in litigation.