Malpractice Task Force Takes Shape
By ELIZABETH SOLOMONT,
Members of Governor Spitzer's medical malpractice liability task force, charged with proposing solutions to New York's high cost of insurance, were named yesterday.
The group, first announced last month, includes organizations representing a range of industry stakeholders, including hospital and physicians' associations, consumer and business groups, health plans, insurers, and lawyers. It also includes representatives of the state Assembly and Senate who have yet to be chosen. The group's first meeting is slated for Tuesday.
In a statement, the group's chairman, Eric Dinallo, the state insurance superintendent, promised to produce "an effective action plan to fix the medical malpractice system, not some report to collect dust." The state health commissioner, Richard Daines, the group's vice chairman, said: "This task force has the collective expertise to help us see beyond where we are to where we need to be."
Members of the task force yesterday said they were eager to address a problem that has been decades in the making.
The president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, Ken Raske, said his group would present several ideas. "The only thing we're wedded to is finding a solution," he said.
Medical malpractice insurance costs in New York are among the highest nationwide, and the state's Insurance Department last month raised liability rates for doctors by 14%. The hike coincided with Mr. Spitzer's creation of the task force.
"The crisis facing practicing physicians is no longer cocktail party banter, it's real. My doctors are leaving the state," the president of the Medical Society of the State of New York, Dr. Robert Goldberg, whose group has members on the task force, said.
The president of the New York State Academy of Trial Lawyers, John Bonina, said his group, also on the task force, was interested in a civil justice system that worked well "for both sides."
"We're coming in with an open mind," he said, adding that his group would protect the "rights of medical negligence victims."
