Medical malpractice ballot measure will benefit attorneys – Orange County Register

Perhaps more than any other state in America, California continues to make progress toward the historic promise of health access for all.

Crucial to that prognosis is our state’s community health centers, which are located in medically underserved communities and provide primary and reproductive care to underserved populations. diverse and vulnerable populations.

Pandemic-related stresses on our overall health system, including the most recent wave of hospitalizations, have underscored the safety net requirement of a robust community clinic system. and financially viable.

It’s hard to imagine a worse time to pass a ballot measure that would disrupt the funding of California’s community health centers and their access to doctors and nurses. Other clinicians provide essential care to Californians in need while increasing medical costs for all Californians. But that’s what proponents of the misleadingly self-proclaimed Injury Fairness Act, or Changes to Medical Negligence Litigation Initiative, appear on the ballot. statewide in November is trying to do.

This measure will significantly affect the cost and delivery of health care in California – but it was not written by medical professionals or actual medical practitioners. Instead, it was designed to allow some people to make millions more from filing personal injury lawsuits.

What’s worse, advocates don’t say what the measure will actually be.

For years, California’s medical liability system was protected by a series of bipartisan legislation called MICRA, the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act, that balanced the rights of injured patients while still maintaining keep healthcare more accessible and affordable for all patients.

Although injured patients can receive unlimited payments for economic damages and medical expenses, there is a “limit” to non-economic damages. Despite what proponents are saying, the Wounded Patient Equity Act will dramatically reform our health system far beyond simply increasing the MICRA cap.

In fact, the Injured Patient Fairness Act blatantly creates a new type of injury without any limitations – which is broadly defined and can include innocuous results such as scarring. unexpected. This is a loophole that could effectively invalidate the MICRA limit and start a frenzy that has brave lawyers filing countless new cases in already overcrowded courts.

To no one’s surprise, the fine print of the Injured Patients Fairness Act surreptitiously removed all existing limits on attorneys’ fees, resulting in large financial sums for adjudication attorneys. doctors, nurses, clinicians and other health care providers for a living. It also created a new process that would prohibit judges from independently verifying the truthfulness of trial attorneys’ statements in original court records – another incentive for more frivolous lawsuits.

And who pays for the onslaught of new lawsuits and attorneys’ fees? The rest of us. This initiative will place an unmanageable burden on our healthcare delivery system at a time when many of our community health centers are operating with limited margins. razor thin and is facing a shortage of personnel.