Frustrated and fighting back: Ob-gyn sues West Virginia trial lawyers

Trial lawyers say the case has no merit. One judge tossed the one-woman drive to change the liability climate, but the physician plans to appeal.

By Tanya Albert, AMNews staff. Jan. 26, 2004.

Julie K. McCammon, MD, is trapped in West Virginia.

The Clarksburg solo ob-gyn tried to leave the state last year when her medical liability insurance rates, which had been increasing since the late 1990s, continued to spiral out of control. But she simply could not afford the $190,000 in tail coverage she would have had to pay her current insurer to leave and set up practice in Virginia.

Then she learned that insurer plans to exit the state, leaving her without coverage in 2005.

"I'm enslaved here," said Dr. McCammon, who set up practice in West Virginia in 1988. "Next year, I'll be out of a job."

Frustrated, Dr. McCammon talked to other physicians around the state and discovered many who said they were named in lawsuits because their name was on a chart but later dropped from the suit because they had no involvement with the procedure in question. But the physicians weren't dropped before their insurers spent money defending the case.

So Dr. McCammon decided to try something different: She sued the West Virginia Trial Lawyers Assn. and its president for engaging in frivolous lawsuits against West Virginia physicians. And she filed the lawsuit on her own, not through an attorney.

"We have to have legal rights, too," said Dr. McCammon, who once unsuccessfully countersued an attorney she believed filed a frivolous lawsuit against her. "People think we are doormats to walk all over."

The AMA and others in organized medicine have been arguing for years that meritless lawsuits against physicians are helping drive up the cost of liability insurance, which is required to practice medicine in most places. Trial lawyers, however, argue that higher costs are due to the cyclical nature of the insurance business and to the fact that physicians are making mistakes.