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| (Willie Brown: "Hey, I tried...") |
Doctors, hospitals and other elements of the medical industry have committed more than $50 million to defeating the measure, while advocates, led by personal injury lawyers, are spending perhaps a fifth as much to pass it.
The increase from $250,000 to $1.1 million reflects inflation since 1975, when the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act (MICRA) was enacted by the Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown, during his first year as governor. It responded to what doctors and hospitals said was a ruinous escalation of malpractice insurance premiums.
Doctors’ wives camped out in Brown’s foyer to dramatize the issue. And the lawyer lobby, then known as the California Trial Lawyers Association, apparently made a big tactical error.
Barry Keene, the legislator who carried MICRA, said last year that he wanted an inflation escalator in the $250,000 cap, but trial lawyers opposed it, believing that a more restrictive bill would be easier to defeat in the Legislature or in the courts.
But the Legislature passed it and the state Supreme Court upheld it. “It may have been a good bet at the time, but it lost,” said Keene.
Had the inflation escalator been adopted in 1975, the cap would be $1.1 million today and 39 years of political war probably would have been averted.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/dan-walters/article3408571.html#storylink=cpy
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