Editorial: Legislation to help doctors is misguided

Monday, Dec. 2, 2002 | 8:43 a.m.

This year a special session of the Nevada Legislature passed tort reforms that were intended to ease the state's medical malpractice insurance crisis. It was hoped that lower malpractice insurance premiums for doctors would ensue, but the insurers didn't lower their rates. (It didn't help that there was no mandate in law that premiums be reduced in return for tort reform.) Now state Sen. Valerie Wiener, D-Las Vegas, is proposing legislation that would allow doctors to recover some of their rising malpractice insurance costs by imposing a $5 or $10 surcharge on patients for each office visit. Wiener acknowledges that her bill is a stopgap measure until it's determined if the tort reforms ultimately will result in lower premiums. The senator is trying to craft a response to a vexing issue, but her proposal is misguided.

Health plans already negotiate with doctors to establish reasonable prices for patients. If those rates can subsequently be hiked by the doctor, what's the point of having a health plan to keep medical costs in check? It also isn't fair to place the burden on patients to help ease the medical malpractice crisis, especially since in recent years patients have seen double-digit percentage increases in their health plans. The bill also would let the medical malpractice insurance companies off the hook -- yet again. There has been plenty of evidence that the medical malpractice premium increases actually were due more to a lousy economy and bad investments in the stock market by the insurance companies than they were due to higher malpractice jury awards. What Nevada and other states should do is zero in on the practices of the insurance industry to ensure tha t premium hikes are justified.