North Carolina House Task Force Hears Debate Medical Malpractice Award Cap

Associated Press

February 12, 2004

Miriam Tripp believes a cap on medical malpractice awards would have reduced the chances that she and her husband would have gotten an out-of-settlement from a hospital.

So the Chapel Hill woman listened especially intently to debate Wednesday over a proposed $250,000 cap on pain and suffering awards. Tripp listened as a task force formed by the state House debated the issue.

In Tripp's case, doctors mistakenly injected medical equipment lens defogger - 70 percent ethyl alcohol - into her husband's sinuses as they prepared him for a procedure. Doctors had thought the fluid in a nearby syringe was a numbing medication, she said.

Her husband, 46, received a secret settlement in November after two years of legal negotiations, Tripp said. The concentrated solution burned out some of his teeth and destroyed most of a major facial muscle that helps open and close his mouth, she said. He also suffers memory problems, she said.

"He ended up with chemical burns," Tripp told the task force Wednesday. "He's not what he used to be."

Few issues have gripped state politics over the last two years as much as medical malpractice caps. And the botched organ transplant last year that led to the death of Jesica Santillan at Duke University Hospital brought the issue of caps, then being debated in Washington, into sharper focus.

The N.C. Academy of Trial Lawyers has worked against the state legislation, saying the cap is unnecessary. Various doctors groups and insurance companies have pushed for the cap in North Carolina and in other states. They say the price of malpractice insurance has skyrocketed, especially for specialties.

"North Carolina has a low number of medical malpractice cases, conservative juries, low medical malpractice premiums, and one of the fastest-growing populations of physicians of any state in the country," said Anna Bridgers, coordinator of the N.C. Coalition for Patients' Rights.

Former N.C. Chief Justice Burley Mitchell told the task force he believes the N.C. Supreme Court, based on precedent and hundreds of years of decisions, would rule that a cap on pain and suffering is constitutional.

But Campbell University assistant law professor Alan D. Woodlief disagreed, saying a cap might interfere with a person's constitutional right to a trial by jury.

Some courts also have found that compensation for pain and suffering can be considered a person's property, which is protected under the law, he said. If a jury awarded someone $500,000, but a judge reduced it to $250,000 because of a cap, then the injured person would be out $250,000, an economic loss, he said.

Information from The Herald-Sun.

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This article posted March 11, 2004.