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Bar News - October 22, 2004 Another View on Med-Malpractice 'Crisis': It's Not the Lawyers The following is a slightly condensed version of an editorial published Sept. 23, 2004 in the Bedford Journal, a publication of the Cabinet Press, and is reprinted with permission. CREDIT REPUBLICAN STATE Senate candidate Harry Haytayan with taking a stand against his fellow lawyers. Mr. Haytayan, who won the GOP nomination Tuesday and will face fellow lawyer David Gottesman in the Nov. 2 general election, believes that jury awards in medical malpractice suits are way too high and are driving doctors out of the state. He could be right on both of those counts, but we don't believe that tort reform is the way to go. Frankly, we think insurance companies need better lawyers. The problem is not with tort attorneys who are in there fighting for every cent they can get for their injured clients. They don't set the level of monetary awards to the injured, nor do judges. Those awards are set by juries, regular men and women, who, after hearing all of the evidence and the closing arguments, are convinced that the injured party deserves a certain amount of money. How can we blame lawyers for that? To cap medical malpractice awards through the misnamed tort "reform" is to, in essence, reject the jury system, and that just doesn't seem right. Mr. Haytayan says this is an issue on which he and Mr. Gottesman have fundamental difference. But while we believe it's an important issue, we don't believe it is one upon which an election should turn. That said, we are still concerned that more and more Republicans see targeting jury awards to injured people as a major campaign issue. To us, the problem doesn't seem to be with the attorneys for the plaintiffs but with juries' mistrust of doctors. If juries believed that doctors sometimes just make honest mistakes, they wouldn't slam them and their insurance companies with huge awards. They would see, perhaps, that the injured party deserved something but not so much that it would drive a doctor out of the state. Yet juries consistently come back with huge awards, indicating that they believe the doctor needs to be punished. Why is there so much mistrust of doctors? That's something legislators ought to be looking at. Here we are in a state that can't seem to cap its property taxes for people on fixed incomes, but we're going great guns to cap awards given by 12 ordinary citizens to injured people. Why?
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