Doctors say plan would reduce lawsuits

Friday, Dec. 6, 2002 | 11:12 a.m.

Two doctors who support efforts to change Nevada's new medical malpractice litigation law to reflect California's more physician-friendly statute say it would help reduce the number of malpractice lawsuits in this state.

Dr. Rudy Manthei, a Las Vegas ophthalmologist and head of "Keep Our Doctors in Nevada," and Dr. Robert Kessler, a Boulder City osteopathic physician, said Thursday that Nevada's law encourages multiple lawsuits involving a single incident because multiple plaintiffs can sue multiple defendants for $350,000 each for pain and suffering.

California's law applies a $250,000 pain and suffering cap per incident regardless of the number of plaintiffs. The doctors want the Nevada Legislature next year to change state law so that Nevada's cap applies per incident and not per plaintiff.

The Sun reported Thursday that there has been a sharp increase in medical malpractice lawsuits filed in Clark County since the new law took effect on Oct. 1. One local attorney attributed most of the increase to a transfer of cases from the state's Medical Dental Legal Screening Panel to Clark County District Court that was allowed under the new law. The law will eliminate the panel -- which consists of doctors and lawyers serving voluntarily and on a rotating basis -- once all its pending cases have been heard.

"When they set the cap in Nevada the problem was that they didn't set it per event," Manthei said. "If a child gets hurt, the child can sue, the mother can sue, the father can sue and they could each sue more than one defendant. You could end up with nine to 12 lawsuits whereas in California you would have only one lawsuit."

But Las Vegas attorney Dean Hardy, past president of the Nevada Trial Lawyers Association, said lawyers typically would lump all the plaintiffs into one lawsuit, meaning there would not be the multiple lawsuits doctors envision.

"Procedurally, it's inappropriate to file multiple lawsuits," Hardy said. "Doctors ought to stick to being doctors and should not try to answer legal questions."

Reno attorney Bill Bradley, another past president of the association, also said the changes sought by the doctors would deprive plaintiffs, including relatives of victims, of being able to hold medical providers fully accountable for their acts.

"To pass laws that make it difficult to bring a lawsuit should alarm every member of our community," Bradley said.

Nevada lawmakers at a special session last summer passed new medical malpractice litigation reforms in an effort to limit skyrocketing malpractice insurance costs that doctors said were forcing them out of business.

Kessler, a fellow in the Osteopathic Heritage Health Policy Fellowship based at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, told other osteopaths at a national conference in Las Vegas in October that Nevada's law had numerous weaknesses. Among them, he said, is that it would encourage more lawsuits.

"We are the poster boy for how not to do it," Kessler said of Nevada's law.

"The medical dental screening panel should have been modified instead of abolished. Its problems were that it was inefficient and did not discourage frivolous lawsuits. The absence of this screening panel means more frivolous suits will be filed."

Hardy said he doesn't think the changes sought by the doctors will hold up constitutionally. But he agreed that elimination of the panel will likely lead to a permanent increase in lawsuits. That's because it will be much less expensive on the front end for an attorney to file a lawsuit than to prepare a case for the panel's consideration, he said.