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MEDICAL MALPRACTICE UPDATE
NCSL Annual Meeting 2005
Law & Criminal Justice Committee Session
The Law & Criminal Justice Committee conducted a session titled "Medical Malpractice Update" on August 17, 2005 at the NCSL Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington. Approximately 150 state legislators, state legislative staff, and industry representatives were in attendance.
The session was videotaped by TVW, the Washington State public affairs network, and the video and audio recordings are available online. Following is a list of the speakers with their presentations.
Senator Michael Balboni of the New York Senate, Chair of the Law & Criminal Justice Committee, presided over the session.
Opening Moderator Remarks
Charles Silver, Center on Lawyers, Civil Justice and the Media, University of Texas School of Law
Professor Silver holds the Roy W. and Eugenia C. McDonald Endowed Chair at the University of Texas School of Law, where he writes and teaches about civil procedure, professional responsibility and, increasingly, health care law and policy. He most recently collaborated on "Project 2: Medical Malpractice Claiming in Texas, 1988-2002," which was an empirical study of medical malpractice tort claims in Texas. Other works related to medical malpractice liability include "The Poor State of Health Care Quality in the U.S.: Is Malpractice Liability Part of the Problem or Part of the Solution?", Cornell Law Review (2004); and "When Should Government Regulate Lawyer-Client Relationships? The Campaign to Prevent Insurers from Managing Defense Costs", 44 Ariz. L. Rev. 787 (2002). He is currently an Associate Reporter on the American Law Institute's Project on Aggregate Litigation and a member of the ABA/TIPS Task Force on the Contingent Fee. He has been Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan Law School and the Vanderbilt University Law School. He received his BA in 1979 from the University of Florida, his MA from the University of Chicago in 1981, and his J.D. from Yale in 1987.
Professor Silver presented the findings of the study on medical liability claims in Texas, which concluded that there is no correlation between damage liability lawsuit awards and medical liability insurance premiums in that state.
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Senator Frank Watson, Senate Republican Leader, Illinois Senate
Senator Watson has represented Greenville, Illinois in the Illinois Senate since 1983 and is currently the Senate Republican Leader. Prior to his service in the Senate, he served four years in the House of Representatives. He serves on the Executive Committee and the Committee of the Whole in his chamber. He is a former trustee and supervisor for the Bond County Central Township, and he received a BS in Pharmacy from Purdue University. Senator Watson spoke on the efforts in the Illinois legislature over the last few years to enact medical liability reform in that state.
Stephen Northrup, U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
Mr. Northrup is the health policy staff director for the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, chaired by U.S. Senator Michael B. Enzi (R-Wyo.). He joined Senator Enzi’s office as health policy advisor in 2003. He previously was the executive director of the Long Term Care Pharmacy Alliance (LTCPA), the executive director of the Medical Device Manufacturers Association (MDMA), and the director of government and community relations at the Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago. He also worked as a legislative analyst for the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and Williams & Jensen, P.C., a Washington DC law firm. He earned his BA from Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and his Master of Public Administration degree from George Mason University.
Mr. Northrup discussed the various bills in Congress focused on medical malpractice reform, focusing specifically on a proposal introduced by Senator Enzi. Most federal bills involve extensive preemption of state law; Senator Enzi's bill would provide grants to states to introduce pilot projects in controlling all facets of medical liability.
(Click here to view printer-friendly version of presentation)
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