House Speaker Michael Madigan last year sent a
clear message to Gov. Rod Blagojevich when he brought all of the
governor’s highly unpopular tax and fee hikes to the floor
for up-or-down votes.
The governor’s bills all lost by
overwhelming margins, and Blagojevich was forced to back down from
his demand that Madigan pass his proposals.
Madigan appeared to be sending a similar
message to the all-powerful trial lawyers last week when he allowed
an amendment to the floor that would cap noneconomic damages in
medical-malpractice suits at $1 million for doctors and $2 million
for hospitals.
The amendment was far more agreeable to the
trial lawyers than the bill it was supposed to be attached to. The
underlying bill would cap the damages at $250,000 for docs and
$500,000 for hospitals.
But Madigan, the trial lawyers’ top ally
in Springfield, had muscled that tough caps bill out of committee
the same morning. The bill didn’t have enough votes on the
committee, so Madigan substituted three Democratic members for
three other Democrats who favored malpractice caps. The Democrats,
mostly downstaters, believe the caps will help ease what they
consider a health-care crisis. Doctors, particularly in southern
Illinois and the Metro East, near St. Louis, are abandoning their
Illinois practices for other states.
The docs say damage caps would lower their
malpractice-insurance premiums, and their voices are being heard.
Last year, the issue defeated the Democratic candidate for the
state Supreme Court. Gordon Maag, who should have won in a walk,
not only lost that race but also lost his retention bid for the state appeals
court, an almost unheard-of result.
Politicians notice when such things happen,
and Madigan, the trial lawyers’ greatest friend, finally
decided that something needed to be done.
So Madigan brought the rather extreme cap bill
to the floor. And to send a message to the trial lawyers that they
were on the losing side of this battle, he allowed a vote on the
lawyer-friendly amendment.
When it came time to vote, most of
Madigan’s Democrats sided with the doctors and against the
trial lawyers, including Democratic state Rep. Jay Hoffman, who
works for one of the top trial-law firms in the Metro East.
Message sent.
The trial lawyers have responded to all of
this as any attorney would, with well-reasoned arguments and plenty
of studies, facts and constitutional arguments that back up their
positions. But the General Assembly is not a courtroom, and
legislators are not judges.
The legislators’ object here is not to
get at the ultimate truth and pass a bill on its
“merits” but to get their hometown doctors off their
backs and out of politics.
Democrats believe that once rank-and-file
doctors are placated with caps, they’ll focus their ire where
the Dems believe it really belongs: on their malpractice-insurance
companies and, especially, the Illinois State Medical
Society’s insurance company, which has been driving the
Springfield med-mal debate for years as it was raising premiums on
its own doctors.
Besides, the lawyers are about two years too
late. They relied so much on Madigan to bottle up any hostile
proposals for so long that they never thought they needed to
justify their positions. In the meantime, they became arrogant and
sloppy, and the public debate completely got away from them.
And now all the briefing books in the world
haven’t been able to stop the doctors’ momentum.
There’s still no guarantee that a caps
bill will ever reach the governor’s desk, but it’s a
lot closer now than it has ever been under Democratic rule.
This article appears in May 19-25, 2005.
