AUSTIN - Republican Gov. Rick Perry and other proponents of state limits on medical malpractice damage awards cited surveys Monday they say show hospitals and patients are benefiting under the new Texas system.
Doctors, however, aren't fully experiencing the reduced malpractice insurance premiums they'd hoped for after passage of the new law and state constitutional amendment a year ago, according to a survey by the Texas Medical Association.
"We've started to turn the corner, but we still have a long way to go," said Dr. Bohn Allen, TMA president.

Lawsuits against hospitals have declined, as have hospital malpractice insurance premiums, a survey by the Texas Hospital Association found. Liability premiums decreased 17 percent overall for 2004-05 among 172 acute-care hospitals, the survey determined.

Some medical centers are finding it easier to recruit new doctors, the governor said Monday in an interview with The Associated Press.

"It was always about access to health care and places in the state that had really seen their health care rationed" because of lawsuits and resulting damage awards, Perry said.

On Tuesday, the governor is embarking on a five-city trip to talk up the new system, which he says has improved access to medical care. He's taking that message to Dallas, Corpus Christi, Beaumont, San Antonio and McAllen, joined by Dr. J. Edward Hill, president-elect of the American Medical Association.

"We're going back into some of the communities that had some of the worst examples of physicians leaving, hospitals cutting back," Perry said.

He cited Nueces County as having improved. Driscoll Children's Hospital has hired 11 new pediatric specialists in the past year, and Christus Spohn has recruited a neurosurgeon after losing four of them in the past three years, according to the governor's office.

A state law was enacted Sept. 1, 2003, that limited non-economic damages, such as pain and suffering, in medical malpractice lawsuits. Voters narrowly approved a proposition that month cementing the damage award caps in the state constitution.

The new law set a $750,000 cap on non-economic damages in medical malpractice lawsuits and limited awards against individual doctors to $250,000 in each case. Actual damages incurred by a plaintiff aren't capped.

Opponents claim the new law shuts off court access for legitimate lawsuits and that it hasn't resulted in lower malpractice insurance rates for physicians.

"Doctors haven't seen premiums come down. They were promised lower premiums. They deserve lower premiums. They haven't seen it," said Alex Winslow, program director for the consumer group Texas Watch, which worked against the lawsuit limitation law.

The survey by the Texas Medical Association, a physicians' group, found that doctors are starting to slow their pace in cutting services; some have reinstated certain services.

Thirteen percent of the 1,259 doctors responding said they have stopped providing certain services since September 2003. Neurosurgeons, orthopedic surgeons and obstetrician/gynecologists were still cutting back on services at higher rates than doctors overall, the survey found.

"But the pace of improvement will pick up when and if all professional liability insurance carriers cut their rates," Allen said.

One major insurance carrier, the physician-owned Texas Medical Liability Trust, has cut its premiums by 12 percent. Others have not.

Texas Insurance Commissioner Jose Montemayor testified before a legislative committee in April that about 60 percent of Texas doctors had not seen a malpractice insurance rate decrease since enactment of the new law and constitutional amendment.

Perry said physicians' insurance rates are declining more slowly than those of hospitals because of the volume of lawsuits filed against doctors immediately before the Sept. 1, 2003, enactment of the new law.

"It will take another year for those frivolous lawsuits that were filed under the old system to work their way out of the process," he said.