The plight of health care in Leflore County is getting out of hand, hospital and nursing home administrators say.
"This thing is getting real serious," said Bob Barrett, executive director of Greenwood Leflore Hospital.
Leflore County legislators and health-care providers are puzzled over who to blame for the exodus of insurance companies providing medical malpractice coverage in Mississippi.
But the health-care providers say the only answer to the problem is to reform the state's legal climate.
"The insurance companies are telling people off the record that the reason they're leaving Mississippi is because of the legal environment," said Bill Henderson, associate director for clinic administration at Greenwood Leflore Hospital. "They also said the legal environment is the only thing we can do something about."
Henderson and other administrators from Greenwood Leflore Hospital and Golden Age Nursing Home painted for the legislators a dreary picture of healthcare in Leflore County. They and the rest of the Governmental Affairs Committee of the Greenwood-Leflore County Chamber of Commerce met with the Leflore County delegation Wednesday in Jackson.
The hospital and nursing home are suffering, they say, because of outrageous insurance premiums.
Proposed tort reform legislation is taking aim at a legal climate that has produced a number of multi-million-dollar verdicts. Prior to 1995, no jury verdicts in Mississippi surpassed $9 million. Since then there have been at least 19, with six topping $100 million each.
Promoters of reform link those results to an insurance crisis that has left hospitals without coverage and pushed 11 of 21 obstetricians out of their practices in Washington, Sunflower, Bolivar and Leflore counties. Only two of four obstetricians are still delivering babies at Greenwood Leflore Hospital.
Rep. Willie Perkins, D-Greenwood, however, said he will not seek legislation that offers no guarantee of producing results. "The real problem is the insurance companies. There's no guarantee from anybody that if the legislature passes tort reform, premiums will go down," Perkins said.
Perkins, whose brother practices internal medicine, said no jury verdict in Mississippi has awarded punitive damages against doctors.
St. Paul Cos., one of Mississippi's largest insurance providers, announced in December that it was dropping its medical malpractice coverage in the state. The company is pulling out of other states besides Mississippi, Perkins said. Poor decisions, bad investments and the economic recession have taken a toll on insurance providers, and the companies are in effect passing their woes down the line, he said.
Henderson acknowledged the problem is "multi-factored" and did not exonerate the insurance companies, but again stressed that legal reform would be the only way to show restraint to outside companies and providers.
Sen. David Jordan, D-Greenwood, sided with Perkins. Jordan considers the insurance companies to be part of the problem. Punishing only the trial lawyers while the insurance companies, unscathed, watch from a safe distance would be unfair, he said.
"If the culprits are the lawyers, then why does everybody want to take the insurance companies off the hook? They're the ones setting the rates," Jordan said.
Over a two-year period, Golden Age Nursing Home in Greenwood saw its premiums more than triple, from $22,000 in 2000 to $73,000 in 2001.
"We've got a situation that has even gotten worse over the last couple of days," said Ed Hill, administrator of Golden Age, calling the current situation the most serious matter in his 33 years of health care. "We had 11 physicians on our staff, and starting last year two doctors dropped off the staff because of Medicaid reimbursement problems. Now we have a couple of doctors talking about the same thing, including our medical director."
Hill blames the ballooning rates on out-of-state attorneys who come to take advantage of Mississippi's legal system. He specifically cited the recent Mississippi campaign of Wilkes & McHugh, a Florida law firm that won the largest verdicts ever reached against Florida and Arkansas nursing homes.
The firm has hired "four or five lobbyists in Mississippi," according Sen. Bunky Huggins, R-Greenwood. One of those lobbyists is former Lt. Gov. Brad Dye, Huggins said. "They're serious, and they're paying big money," he said.
Alabama lawyers are opening firms to bring trials into Mississippi, Huggins said. He said a similar thing happened in the past to other states.
"If they are as successful in Mississippi as they were in Florida and Texas, insurance could run up to $8,000 per bed per year. And we're broke. We don't have Medicaid money," Huggins said, referring to the $148-million deficit the state Medicaid program is facing.
The state has to do something about the influx of legal outsiders, and reform is the answer, Hill said. "It wont get any better till we run them out of here," he said. "We need some kind of reform to make Mississippi less attractive to out-of-state lawyers."
With insurance companies shaking their hands of any culpability, trial lawyers and physicians will have to come to some kind of agreement, Jordan said. Answers will not come from pointing fingers at any one suspect, he said. "It won't be a one-way deal."
