SCRANTON, PA -- President Bush said Thursday the amount that injured patients can win from their doctors must be limited "for the sake of affordable and sensible health care in America."
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Mr. Bush Sen. Edward M. Kennedy |
In the 18th trip he has made to this politically important state since his inauguration, Mr. Bush called on Congress to deliver on medical-malpractice reform.
The president argued that "frivolous and junk lawsuits" are the primary cause of rising health-care costs and doctor shortages that leave patients without care.
"The problem of those unnecessary costs isn't in the waiting room or the operating room -- they're in the courtroom," Mr. Bush said in a speech at the University of Scranton in northeastern Pennsylvania.
The president said capping jury awards in medical-malpractice lawsuits is the answer. "We need reform all across America and we need a law coming out of the United States Congress," he said.
Any proposal for tort reform -- a Republican priority -- cranks up fierce lobbying. Democrats, backed by trial lawyers, were aggressively promoting their views more than a day ahead of the president's address, and special-interest groups planned protests.
During last year's campaign season, Mr. Bush frequently raised the issue of tort reform as one he could solve if voters handed him a completely Republican-controlled Congress, which they did.
Mr. Bush could also wield the issue in any 2004 run against Sen. John Edwards, a hopeful for the Democratic presidential nomination and a lawyer who made millions trying personal-injury lawsuits before he was elected to the Senate. Mr. Bush made his last major speech on the matter in Sen. Edwards's home state of North Carolina.
Physicians, especially in high-risk specialties, complain that skyrocketing insurance rates are driving them to close or scale back their practices. That leaves patients confronting doctor shortages or rising health-care costs in many communities.
In arguing for a nationwide cap, Mr. Bush says that states' failure to adopt liability limits on their own is damaging the nation's health-care system and costing the federal government billions in higher health costs.
Bush-backed legislation was approved in the House last year but was never brought for a vote in the then-Democratic-led Senate. That measure wouldn't have capped damages for actual financial losses such as wages and medical expenses. But it would have superseded state laws -- such as Pennsylvania's ban on capping malpractice awards -- to limit noneconomic damages such as pain and suffering to $250,000, and punitive damages to twice actual losses, up to a cap of $250,000. Patients' ability to file lawsuits over old cases would be limited and lawyers' fees curtailed.
"For the sake of affordable and sensible health care in America, we must have a limit on what they call non-economic damages ... and punitive damages," Mr. Bush said.
Democrats retort that large jury awards aren't the issue. They say the insurance industry is to blame for increasing premiums beyond many doctors' reach. They also believe Americans' ability to hold physicians legally accountable is crucial to quality health care.
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D., Mass.) said the changes that Mr. Bush is proposing "would deprive seriously injured patients of fair compensation and do nothing to guarantee that doctors could obtain malpractice insurance at a fair price."
White House press secretary Ari Fleischer dismissed the criticism. "At a time when moms have to change doctors to deliver their babies, that type of division is not helpful," he said.
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