Tuesday, June 25, 2002 | 11:10 a.m.
Three Clark County commissioners urged Gov. Kenny Guinn to call a special legislative session to extend University Medical Center's $50,000 cap on liability damages to all physicians who work in the hospital's trauma center and emergency department.
Commission Chairman Dario Herrera and fellow Commissioners Erin Kenny and Yvonne Atkinson Gates also said at a press conference Monday at UMC that they would apply the cap to all physicians who serve indigent patients at the county-funded hospital.
But they conceded that the cap alone would not be enough to curb skyrocketing insurance premiums that have caused an undisclosed number of doctors to either resign or threaten to resign from their on-call duties at UMC.
"We have tried everything we can in the short term to keep the doors open at the trauma center," Herrera said. "Unfortunately, there is only so much we can do without legislative reform."
Herrera also said he plans to call an emergency commission meeting to consider temporary measures to solve the medical malpractice insurance crisis as it relates to UMC, though he did not set a date. The seven commissioners double as the county's hospital board.
In addition to the caps, the three commissioners also want state lawmakers to reform a law known as the Joint and Several Liability Act to ensure that health care professionals pay only their proportionate share of damages recovered by injured plaintiffs. Kenny, chairwoman of the hospital board, wrote to Guinn Monday that reform of that law would ensure that physicians "do not become the deep pocket because of UMC's $50,000 liability cap."
"I fully realize that these two issues are not long-term solutions to the medical malpractice crisis and that other substantial reforms are needed," Kenny wrote to Guinn. "However, action on this legislative agenda will ensure that UMC is able to fulfill its role as the community hospital for Clark County and a medical resource for the entire state. I am unaware of UMC having any disruptions in service during its 71-year history, and such an event would be regrettable."
Guinn spokesman Greg Bortolin said: "We need concrete details of this proposal before we can comment. The governor and his staff need to review this."
Under existing law, a patient who sues UMC for $1 million for medical malpractice could collect only $50,000 from the hospital itself but could go after the physicians for the remaining $950,000. The three commissioners have proposed that the patient be allowed to collect no more than $50,000 combined from the hospital and from physicians per claim.
Spouses and children, under their proposal, would still be allowed to file separate claims regarding the same medical incident but would also be limited to the $50,000 cap. That means that if a man filed a medical malpractice claim against UMC, and his wife and two children also filed separate claims over the same incident, the total damages they could collect would be $200,000.
The only UMC physicians currently covered by the $50,000 cap are those who are employed full-time by the hospital. Most of the 1,400 physicians on the medical staff are in private practice.
Kenny said she believed the ability to provide health care to county residents outweighed the need for them to be able to sue for more than $50,000 in damages. Donald Haight, acting director of risk management for UMC, also said the fiscal impact of the commissioners' proposals on the self-insured hospital would be minimal.
"You'll see an offset of some costs of litigation because the damages would be a lot lower with the $50,000 cap," Haight said. "I don't think the costs would put our self-insured facility in jeopardy."
But Las Vegas attorney Dean Hardy, past president of the Nevada Trial Lawyers Association, called the proposal from Herrera, Kenny and Gates a "piecemeal approach to a comprehensive problem that is not going to solve the problem." Hardy said the proposal smacks of tort reform when the real answer is insurance premium reform.
"If you don't like the civil justice system, let's talk about the civil justice system," Hardy said. "Let's talk about why the premiums reached this point, which is because St. Paul Companies captured 60 percent of market share and then pulled out.
"The doctors holding the governor and the Legislature hostage is not what the community needs. We need to calm this hysteria, not incite it."
Dr. Raj Chanderraj, president of the Clark County Medical Society, said he supported the cap proposal.
"Unless civil justice reforms take place, you'll see a more severe crisis next year," Chanderraj said. "This is only a temporary fix."
The proposal also was cheered by Dr. Lonnie Hammargren, a neurosurgeon and former lieutenant governor who has practiced at UMC for 31 years. Hammargren said he once spent seven years and $56,000 in litigation costs to dismiss a UMC-related lawsuit filed by a patient he never met.
"It's essential and something we've argued about for many years," Hammargren said of the cap. "This cap would allow us to treat indigent people an trauma patients while giving us freedom from massive lawsuits."
Hammargren said he believes most physicians who have left UMC over the medical malpractice insurance dilemma would return to the hospital if the cap was made permanent.
Guinn told lawyers, doctors and insurers meeting together for the first time on June 17 that they had 37 days to reach a compromise in order for him to call a special legislative session to consider a joint proposal. However, a second meeting scheduled for Monday in Las Vegas was postponed until next week so that all participants could gather more data to support their respective positions.
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