Malpractice 'reforms' go too far

If you had kept your car covered with Ajax Insurance for 10 years, had no accidents and had made no claims but the insurance company steadily raised your rates, wouldn't you be upset?

If Ajax agreed that your record was spotless but it had to assess against all policyholders because some of them, a minority, had extreme losses, wouldn't you be upset? You'd expect those responsible to pay for that cost.

What if you went to the trouble of checking out Ajax's story and found out the company had lied to you -- that losses had stayed the same or dropped? You would want Ajax to answer for that, and you would be right.

Suppose you got mad enough at these hikes that you spoke to your legislators in Jefferson City and, instead of doing something about the greed of that company, the legislators passed a law that focused on pedestrians as the villain?

Sound farfetched?

Well, our local legislators are doing their level best to remove the focus away from the insurance industry, which has been gouging doctors on their malpractice rates, even though the statistics show there has been no change in the volume of cases in the past five years. Average payouts have stayed virtually the same for the past decade. And medical malpractice costs, as a percentage of national health-care costs, are at an all-time low of 0.55 percent.

State Reps. Jason Crowell of Cape Girardeau and Rod Jetton of Marble Hill and state Sen. Peter Kinder believe the solution is to go after the victims of malpractice by placing artificial limits on their recovery rather than adjusting the amount you can recover for inflation as it is now. And they want to allow doctors to practice without malpractice insurance so even if you won at a trial, you might not recover anything.

Not one significant part of their so-called reform is directed to the insurers who have charged these premiums and who took a bath on the bond market, as cyclically happens. Instead of providing relief to the doctors from their oppressive rates by closely scrutinizing the insurance carrier's rates, they go for a blanket restriction against victims of medical malpractice.

If you buy what the companies are selling, I have an old Cape bridge to sell you. More importantly, why are our legislators, who are supposed to look out for their constituents' rights, not addressing this? No question these are tough times for our state, but nothing in these tough times justifies correcting it on the back of innocent victims and allowing the parties actually responsible for the problem to get off scot-free.

In 1986, all the sides involved in tort actions, plaintiff and defense attorneys, met and came up with a solution, which has worked since then and still works. The current legislative action to drastically ravage the civil trial system is a deliberate attack on individual rights by the insurance and defense bar.

We have good doctors here. But God forbid if your child were hurt by some doctor's negligence. Understand that in Missouri 5 percent of the doctors are responsible for 45 percent of the claims. Would you want your right to recover to be limited because some insurance executive or company agent said we needed such a limit?

If you agree, tell Representatives Crowell and Jetton and Senator Kinder their reform is something we can do without. Tell them to deal with the real problem.

Michael H. Maguire of Cape Girardeau is a lawyer.