Colorado’s state Senators approved a bill last week which will make healthcare more costly and much harder to obtain if it becomes law by passage by the House and signed by the governor. Senate Bill 164 is a measure that will bring more profits and income to the attorneys who work within the medical liability system, while costing citizens more in health-care costs and making services such as emergency care and obstetrical care unavailable in all but the large cities of Colorado.

The family doctors and primary care physicians in the Western Slope towns such as Meeker, Fruita, Palisade, Craig, Delta, Montrose, Gunnison, Eagle, Carbondale and Rifle need to provide an array of services for the individuals and communities in which they serve. The majority of their services will be office care of ill persons and those with chronic diseases, but they are also called upon to treat trauma victims in the emergency rooms and provide prenatal and delivery services for women. Senate Bill 164 will make the risks of suits much greater for these doctors, especially for rather simple but important services such as repairing a laceration or casting a broken arm. Rural doctors will not be able to afford the premiums for liability insurance for “risky” obstetrical and emergency services, so they will be forced to stop doing them. Patients will need to go to the larger cities to get the services they need.

Colorado had successfully stopped runaway liability costs over the past 20 years due to the Healthcare Availability Act. We have a non-economic damages cap of $300,000, which will go as high as $924,000 if this bill becomes the law. Doctors and hospitals will be open to many more claims for “pain” and “disfigurement” and liability insurance rates will be much higher. These costs will be passed on to the citizens of Colorado, or doctors will simply quit practicing medicine to avoid the threats of suits and huge malpractice costs. A similar bill to SB 164 passed in New York, with these dire consequences now occurring to its citizens. Health-care costs in Pennsylvania and Florida are much higher than in Colorado because of out-of-control liability costs, a future we should be avoiding.

The current medical liability system is unfair and inefficient. It is in need of complete reform. The current system enables the trail lawyers, defense lawyers and insurance companies to consume 70 percent of all of the money paid into the system for their profits and operations. Only 30 percent of the funds are used to compensate those who are harmed by negligence. And 95 percent of those harmed by negligence are never compensated. Meanwhile doctors are forced to order huge numbers of tests, X-rays, blood work, etc. so they will have a defense should someone decide to sue them. There are only one set of winners in this current system, and these are the trail lawyers and others who profit so handsomely from this unfair system. Senate Bill 164 does nothing to fix this system, and in fact will add millions of dollars to the profits of those who are supporting this bill.

Senate Bill 164 was written by the Colorado Trial Lawyers Association and is strongly supported by the that groupp. It will not make the liability system more efficient or fair, but it will result in huge additional profits for the few trail lawyers who are already making exorbitant sums from a dysfunctional system of dispute resolution.

Please tell Gov. Ritter and members of the House of Representatives to stop Senate Bill 164. We citizens should be finding ways to decrease health-care costs and increase access to health care (the goals of the 208 Commission) and not the exact opposite which this legislation is poised to do.

DAVID M. WEST, M.D.
Family Physician
Grand Junction

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 9:14 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.