Doctors meet to study lawmaking process

Stacy J. Willis

Thursday, Aug. 1, 2002 | 9:27 a.m.

As lawmakers were trying to come to a compromise in the medical malpractice crisis, Las Vegas doctors met Wednesday night to come to try to understand a process few had studied before -- the state Legislature.

"How does that phrase go?" Dr. Paul Canale asked a crowd of disgruntled doctors at Sunrise Hospital last night, "You don't want to see how sausage is being made or how law is made?"

Canale was expressing his frustration and unfamiliarity with what's going on in Carson City -- where the legislative special session to address rising medical malpractice insurance rates was rolling into its third night Wednesday.

Canale and more than 100 other Las Vegas doctors piled into a small conference room at Sunrise, invited the media, and held a meeting that turned out to be one part grousing about the lawmaking process and one part battlecry for MICRA, California's Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act.

"We are organizing this to demonstrate to the community how important this is -- we are past the concern about what kind of political winds may flow. MICRA is the absolute minimum necessary to keep doctors practicing in Las Vegas," Canale said. "Doctors are leaving right now."

Doctors say that provisions in MICRA, such as a $250,000 cap on pain and suffering awards, would make their insurance rates return to affordable amounts.

Nothing at the Legislature, however, indicates lawmakers will enact MICRA in its entirety. By early morning, long after the doctors had met, lawmakers had reached a deal that had some similarities to the California plan.

To express their outrage, several doctors at the meeting toted in "For Sale" signs from their front yards -- Canale is moving to Flagstaff, Ariz. because of the medical malpractice problem. Others held up hand-written placards saying "MICRA is the answer" and "We need MICRA -- no exceptions."

They passed the microphone and took turns venting about the political system: Some were upset that once they thought they had an agreement from state leaders, it was busted; that once an unfavorable provision was dropped from the end of the bill, it mysteriously emerged at the top of the bill; that most lawmakers don't answer their phones, that several allegedly don't know how to receive e-mail or faxes, that they have been told one thing and gotten another, or gotten nothing at all.

"But we don't have the kind of money the lawyers do," Dr. Michael Colletti, a rheumatoligist, said.

The answer to doctors' increasing frustration then, he said, is to push harder to enlist the help of the public -- the patients.

"We have to get politically active," said Dr. James Marx, an OB/GYN. "We have to step up."

Marx encouraged doctors to talk to each of their patients about the political issue and tell them who to vote for.

"We see 10, 20, 30 patients a day. ... They better vote for the people I've suggested if they want to come back and look me in the eye," Marx said.

Dr. Joe Hardy, a family physician and Boulder City Councilman, cautioned the group that even after the session, the politics of medical malpractice will go on.

"We will never be done with the politics of this," said Hardy, who is running for an Assembly seat. "Whatever the Legislature does, it will not be an automatic 'Now we have lower premiums,"' Hardy said. "We are in this for the long haul."