Trial Lawyers Submit Ballot Initiative to Overturn MICRA
Late yesterday, California’s trial attorneys made good on their May threat to ask voters to repeal California’s landmark Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act (MICRA). Language was submitted to the California Attorney General in Sacramento, the first step in placing an initiative on the ballot. The initiative’s main provision would increase the cap on speculative, “non-economic” damages from the current $250,000 to more than $1.2 million with automatic increases every year.
The measure filed yesterday is nothing more than a self-serving attempt by trial lawyers to generate more in legal fees.
CMA and a coalition of doctors, hospitals, nurses, community clinics, local governments, labor unions, police, emergency responders, employer groups, and others will wage a significant campaign to expose the lawyers’ self-serving agenda and to defeat the measure.
If the trial lawyers are successful, it will cause malpractice rates to skyrocket, force the closure of safety-net clinics, and recreate the same conditions that threatened to throw California’s healthcare system into crisis during the early 1970s.
Imagine receiving notice that your medical malpractice premiums will increase 250% or even 400%. That’s what occurred in 1974 and 1975, leading to a crisis of unprecedented proportions that forced providers close their doors, leave California, or choose to go without coverage.
That’s why MICRA was passed, and that is why we must work to stop the trial attorneys from obliterating the cap that has protected patients and physicians from repeating the crisis of the past.
California’s physicians must rise to stop this attack, and, in order to do so, CMA needs your support.
Physicians know the value of MICRA, but it will be costly to educate the general public to ensure they are not misled by deceitful trial attorneys looking for increased paydays. Funding is needed to continue our public outreach campaign, targeted voter mailings, and strategic advertising. Each of these tactics helps ensure that California’s public knows the tremendous threat posed to health care in California by the trial attorneys' misguided money grab.
In short, we need your help.
To help us defend MICRA, we are asking that you donate $150 (or more!) to CMA's political action committee (CALPAC) today. CALPAC is the state’s only political action committee operated by physicians, for physicians, and has for the last 38 years served as the first line of defense of MICRA.
CLICK HERE TO DEFEND YOUR ABILITY TO PRACTICE IN CALIFORNIA
For more information on MICRA and how you can help, visit www.cmanet.org/micra.