Columnist Jon Ralston: Results of session are pending

Friday, Aug. 2, 2002 | 4:07 a.m.

Meaningful tort reform, those who were involved call it. But nobody knows whether it will be meaningful, despite the best-laid plans of the governor and the Gang of 63.

Insurance companies, which took a hiatus from writing liability policies to write state tort reform policies, remain subject to the caprices of the economy, the relatively tiny risk pool here and their understandable rule of abandoning a marketplace that isn't profitable.

We won't know for years whether we will experience a modest or dramatic altering of the settlement environment -- that is, there is no high jury award epidemic here, but many doctors have settled at large amounts to avoid putting their personal assets at risk, which they no longer have to do.

In fact, only a few things are clear in the wake of a session called for by doctors, dictated by insurance companies and resolved by buffeted lawmakers who tried to avoid committing legislative malpractice in balancing access to health care with the rights of victims.

Here's the Political Tort Reform Report:

But the governor also was like a surgeon who wants to ensure the heart is healthy and inserts a pacemaker to regulate its beating. He then leaves the operating room, his assistants remove the pacemaker, believing it is not necessary. Upon his return, the doctor looks at the heart, less the pacemaker, and says: "Yeah, we really didn't need that."

That's what happened on the so-called exceptions to the $350,000 cap that were delineated in the governor's bill -- brain damage, death, blindness and so on. And we will see if the policy causes any long-term pain and suffering for plaintiffs, who can still argue in those cases to blow the cap, or the governor, whose imperative for consensus and comity could affect other important debates in '03 (hello, taxes).

Lawmakers actually deserve credit for not dithering, moving carefully but expeditiously and producing a bill that not everyone loves but may prove to be workable. But if the public soon sees this as the product of caving in to insurance company pressures, or doing little to ameliorate the problem, some incumbents could be adjudged guilty of gross negligence -- and that will put all of their political assets at risk.

Yes, there are serious questions some physicians raise such as whether carriers will cancel doctors who got to their policy limits on awards, as the bill mandates, and whether the exception allowing lawyers to argue to a judge to erase the cap in "exceptional circumstances" really will change anything. But it's hard to argue that a group that would have required reams of paper in any past effort to report lobbying errors did not achieve a substantial victory this time.

And, yes, even though this bill was tendentiously dubbed "Nevada MICRA" to make it sound like the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act, this is not a law with a $250,000, no-exception cap. Nevada now has tort reform, which cannot be seen as anything but a loss.

As for long-term pain and suffering, that's a different story as doctors, lawyers and lawmakers will be chanting "insurance reform," whatever that means, come February.

Don't expect definitive answers anytime soon.