Capitol offenses
A Times EditorialPublished April 16, 2005
Doctors and hospitals in Florida already receive special legal protection, including limits on certain damages, when accused of malpractice. Now some want even more, even if it means second-class citizenship for women.
One bill, HB 1331, approved on a party line split of the House Judiciary Committee would make malpractice more difficult to prove in cases alleging misread mammograms. The burden of proof would be higher, expert witnesses would be limited, and subsequent mammograms more than three months old could not be introduced for comparison.
The pretext is that fear of litigation is shrinking the number of doctors willing to read mammograms, but the accuracy of that assertion is unclear. Florida's women don't deserve to be guinea pigs in yet another ill-founded experiment.
It's not news, to be sure, that legislative committees are shirking their duty to kill bad bills. Another example:
The Senate Judiciary Committee okayed SB 214, which instructs judges to schedule criminal trials on the demand of a prosecutor who thinks the defendant has stalled long enough. That intrudes on the Florida Supreme Court's constitutional authority to establish rules of court. Moreover, the constitutional right to a speedy trial belongs exclusively to defendants, who sometimes need to waive it in order to properly defend a case that the state already may have spent months or years preparing. There is no evidence that judges have abused their discretion in granting more time.
Depending on how the Florida Supreme Court rules, Floridians may soon experience the largest telephone rate increase in history, courtesy of your Legislature. The pretext was to encourage and reward competition.
So long as there's not too much of it. CS for SB 2072 and HB 1325 would prevent more cities from providing Internet or broadband service, as about a dozen already offer. If they can use their existing power lines to provide their own citizens with another service at fair rates, the Legislature has no business stopping them. Those bills may be good business for the powerful telephone companies, but they're bad business for the public.