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ALISA ULFERTSAs another special session looms, the impact on Medicaid patients becomes an issue.
TALLAHASSEE - Medicaid patients are the newest pawns in the medical malpractice fight.
Attempting to alter the debate before another special session next week, the Florida Medical Association and Gov. Jeb Bush's administration said Wednesday that rising malpractice premiums will force doctors to drop Medicaid patients.
That is a different explanation than state officials previously have used for the shortage of doctors willing to treat patients on Medicaid. The problem is traditionally blamed on Medicaid's low reimbursement rates, not medical malpractice premiums.
But Bush and the FMA, which have failed to convince the state Senate to embrace a $250,000 limit on pain and suffering awards in malpractice cases, are waging a public relations battle to shift opinion before next week's special session.
At a news conference Wednesday, FMA officials waved a stack of papers they said were more than 1,000 affidavits signed by doctors adversely affected by medical malpractice.
Those doctors said they have left the state, curtailed their practices or are thinking of leaving or stopping services. One affidavit blown up on a posterboard noted a physician's intent to stop seeing Medicaid patients.
FMA officials refused to release copies of the affidavits, saying they still were tallying the results.
FMA officials said they planned to hand the affidavits over to the Senate Judiciary Committee. That's where senators put insurance and medical lobbyists under oath last month to poke holes in the argument that increased lawsuits have caused insurance premiums to skyrocket.
The FMA, Bush and House Speaker Johnnie Byrd have blamed runaway lawsuits for the premium increases and have sought a $250,000 cap on pain and suffering damages in medical malpractice lawsuits.
Senate President Jim King and other moderate Senate Republicans have refused.
"We have been challenged to prove that there is a health care access crisis," said FMA executive vice president Sandra Mortham. "The access problem is no doubt real and it is worsening."
Hardest hit could be Medicaid patients, who are often sicker than the general population but who may not be able to find a doctor to treat them, said Agency for Health Care Administration Secretary Rhonda Medows.
Doctors may have to drop out of the state's Medicaid program to concentrate on other private-pay patients to meet their overhead costs, Medows said.
"Physicians will have to make a choice, a business decision, about who to serve," Medows said.
But by bringing Medicaid patients into the argument, the FMA and top state health officials opened themselves up to criticism that they are using the state's most vulnerable citizens, the indigent sick, as pawns in the biggest political fight this year.
Doctors more likely are dropping patients because of the reimbursement rates rather then out of fear of being sued, said Sen. Tom Lee, a Brandon Republican and key medical malpractice legislation negotiator.
AHCA's request to increase doctors' reimbursement rates by 9 percent did not make into this year's budget.
"If we've learned anything about this, it's that health care is every bit as much a business as banking and lawyers," Lee said. "I will be very surprised if physicians would ignore their responsibilities under the Hippocratic Oath over the economic status of their patients."
Meanwhile, in Orlando, a victims' lobbying group debuted a television advertisement equating insurance companies' claims of a crisis with the lies of Big Tobacco.
"Big Insurance," produced by Floridians for Patient Protection, makes hay of recent sworn testimony by representatives of the insurance industry, the medical field and health care officials.
"Remember when Big Tobacco lied? In Florida, big insurance was playing the same game," says the ad, which is running for two days on network affiliates in Jacksonville, Orlando, Tallahassee, Tampa and West Palm Beach.
- Information from the Associated Press was used in their report.