Report Opposes Cap on Jury Awards
The Record (Bergen County, NJ)
February 3, 2003

Capping jury awards for pain and suffering will hurt the victims of medical mistakes and protect inept doctors, but it won't save New Jersey physicians from skyrocketing malpractice premiums, according to a report by the watchdog group Public Citizen.

The study of government insurance data in New Jersey and elsewhere, released Sunday, found that damage awards barely rose over the past decade, while doctors' premiums climbed slower than the inflation rate.

That's a different picture from the one painted by New Jersey doctors, who plan a statewide strike today to demand reform of the malpractice insurance system. But Public Citizen, the Washington, D.C., group founded by Ralph Nader, insisted that a cap on damages would do more harm than good.

"If anything, we think that there's way too much medical negligence in the country, way too much malpractice," said Frank Clemente, director of Congress Watch, Public Citizen's lobbying arm. "The fear of doctors being sued is an important deterrent to medical malpractice."

The report was the second this weekend to blame soaring premiums not on jury awards but on the economics of the insurance industry. On Friday, Americans for Insurance Reform, a New York-based group, issued a study by former Texas Insurance Commissioner J. Robert Hunter saying that the industry's boom-and-bust investing led to the spike in rates.

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