Doctors take 2nd swing at Nevada tort reform

The petition is one part of physicians' continuing efforts to address medical liability insurance woes in the state.

By Tanya Albert, AMNews staff. Nov. 11, 2002.

A group of Nevada physicians, patients and health care workers believe they've collected enough signatures to ensure that their state Legislature takes another look at tort reform.

Earlier this year, Nevada enacted court system reforms for medical malpractice cases in an effort to keep medical liability insurance available and affordable. But some doctors say the reforms need to be strengthened if the state is serious about keeping physicians in Nevada.

And as long as slightly more than 61,000 of the 80,000 signatures that the group collected are valid, legislators will be required to vote on the reforms on the petition in the first 40 days after their session begins in February 2003.

If lawmakers vote the reforms down, the petition will go before Nevada voters in the 2004 general election. At press time, the state was still verifying signatures.

The tort reform bill the Legislature passed this summer "was a start, but it's very weak and it's ineffective," said Henderson, Nev., ophthalmologist Rudy Manthei, DO, who leads the coalition, which is called Keep Our Doctors in Nevada. "We have to do something."

The petition contains five points:

• Cleaning up language associated with the $350,000 cap on noneconomic damages so that it applies to each injury. Now the cap applies to what each defendant pays to each plaintiff. In California -- the state physicians point to as an example of successful tort reform -- the cap applies to each injury. "As they say, the devil is in the details," said Robert Kessler, DO, a family physician in Boulder City, Nev., who recently completed the Osteopathic Heritage National Health Policy Fellowship through Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine, Athens, Ohio. "Nevada's law encourages multiple plaintiffs to file multiple suits."