JACKSON - When tort reform is the topic, the crybabies come out in force.
Wah-wah-wah. Oh, boo-hoo-hoo.
Doesn't matter whether it's the more radical elements among the doctors or the trial lawyers or the business community. All have their crying towel firmly in their hands.
Their favorite refrain is that the mean old media is "misrepresenting the story." That's French for telling something other than a story that is exclusively biased toward their side's position.
The current whine festival centers on a General Accounting Office report. Congress' investigative arm found that rising medical malpractice insurance rates haven't significantly reduced access to health care in Mississippi and four other states, according to a report released in August.
Media reports - some published by The Clarion-Ledger and other state newspapers - of Mississippi doctors relocating, retiring or closing practices "were not accurate or involved relatively few physicians," the report found. The GAO report noted that in Mississippi, physicians reportedly leaving the state represented 1 percent of all physicians licensed in Mississippi.
Prominent Mississippi trial lawyers point to those findings in the GAO report as proof positive that the media conspired with Big Business and the doctors to "manufacture" a tort reform crisis.
In a recent e-mail sent to this columnist, well-known Jackson attorney Merrida Coxwell had this pungent glass of whine with his tort reform cheese: "I watched a national news show recently and the topic was the willingness of the press to regurgitate what they have been given in press releases and by governments without investigating the information and with little critical analysis," he wrote. "The news commentators themselves agreed this happens much of the time. In the tort reform debate it is exacerbated by the fact that business people and newspaper writers also hate to see lawyers who are successful, even if that success was brought about by a client's success." Sob. Sniffle. Boo-hoo.
The GAO study documented that investigators who studied nine states - including Mississippi - found instances of localized problems of access to health care mostly in "scattered, often rural, areas" that have longstanding problems attracting doctors.
The report also noted that payments on claims against doctors tended to be lower and grew less rapidly on average in states with caps on pain- and-suffering awards than in states with limited reforms, but the amounts varied.
Bottom line, the medical malpractice tort reforms and civil justice system reforms adopted in 2002 haven't been on the books in Mississippi long enough to generate substantial data on whether the reforms will be as effective as promised.
The GAO report is being seized by trial lawyers to bolster their case that caps on jury awards are a bad thing - despite a verifiable history of a few counties in Mississippi in which jury awards have reached ridiculous amounts.
But at the same time, the state's doctors are also attempting to spin the GAO report their way.
In a letter-to-the-editor published Tuesday in the Clarion-Ledger, the state medical association's executive director takes my newspaper to task for publishing facts cited in the GAO report that were unfavorable to doctors and the insurance industry. Same whine, different day.
Tort reform is not an issue that suggests easy answers. It is complex, and the trick is to stifle runaway juries on mass tort roller coasters while not limiting access to the courts by the poor. The media's not perfect, but we come closer to telling the truth here than the players.
