Malpractice Law: Effective or Defective?

Though the California Medical Assn. applauds your series on problems at King/Drew Medical Center, we were shocked by the baseless accusations in the Dec. 12 commentary, “When the Incentive to Save a Life Dies.” Jamie Court twists the truth about the series and California’s Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act to push the trial lawyers’ political agenda. They want to gut MICRA, California’s highly effective medical malpractice premium stabilization law.

Court misstates the findings of The Times’ own investigation when he claims that meager payments for malpractice are “a big factor in why negligence at King/Drew was ignored for so long.” As your series highlighted, King/Drew “pays out more per patient for medical malpractice than any of the state’s 17 other public hospitals or the six University of California medical centers.” The charges against physicians are even more preposterous, scurrilous and defamatory. Court suggests that physicians may acquiesce in the death of a seriously injured child because it is “cheaper to let children die from malpractice in California hospitals than to save them.” This cannot be supported by facts.

MICRA preserves access to care for all Californians, saving our state from the medical liability crisis that is victimizing patients nationwide. And while it caps noneconomic pain and suffering awards at $250,000, compensation for economic damages is not capped, and has risen faster than inflation since the law took effect. There are problems at King/Drew, but MICRA is not one of them.

Robert E. Hertzka MD

President

California Medical Assn.

Sacramento

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Court’s piece is the third in six months that The Times has published relative to the outrage of 30 years ago known as MICRA.

As one who was on the losing side of that battle, it is patent that the chickens have long since come home to roost: Destroying the background threat of effective malpractice compensation to patients, healthcare providers go on doing it the way they always have -- slovenly and with the least resistance. If ever this outrage is to be repealed, The Times will have to take the lead in this battle.

Nathaniel J. Friedman

Attorney, Beverly Hills