Cuomo Task Force proposes med mal cap

It's obsessive - the impulse to cap medical malpractice awards at the $250,000 pain and suffering limit adopted first (I believe) by the Childhood Vaccine Compensation Act and then by California twenty five years ago. Now it's Andrew Cuomo's budget commission's turn. As Tom Baker demonstrated in The Medical Malpractice Myth - there is no crisis in medmal cases. Numerous studies have shown that The sole purpose can be to shift the burden off doctors and hospitals and back to the injured. That and punish lawyers for doing no wrong.


UPDATE:

New York Law Journal ALBANY - March 1, 2011 - The New York State Bar Association and its president yesterday blasted a recommendation by Governor Andrew M. Cuomo's Medicaid reform task force to cap medical malpractice awards for non-economic losses at $250,000.

Such caps are "anathema with respect to equal protection/access to justice," the state bar's Committee on the Tort System said in a memo in opposition to the Medicaid Redesign Team's recommendation. The memo was endorsed by the bar's executive committee.

Stephen P. Younger, the president of the state bar, said that the organization would write to Mr. Cuomo and all 212 state legislators urging them to oppose the cap proposal. Mr. Younger said he and other association officials will also ask state bar members to write letters to their legislators opposing the cap.

"We plan to put a full-court press on," Mr. Younger said yesterday in an interview.