Overlawyered letters

This summer's "doctors won't treat lawyers" episode was a case study in media manipulation. It started when one physician, South Carolina surgeon Chris Hawk, got frustrated and began looking for a way to lash back when lawmakers in his state adjourned without doing anything about the medical liability situation. Dr. Hawk introduced a resolution to the AMA House of Delegates proposing that it's ethically OK for doctors to refuse to treat trial lawyers until something is done about the medical liability crisis.

To repeat... this was ONE doctor exercising his right to introduce a resolution at the AMA annual meeting in Chicago. Hundreds of resolutions are presented to the AMA House of Delegates, generally with support from an identifiable group of physicians. Dr. Hawk had no body of backers for his idea, nor was his own medical society in South Carolina on board with it. Instead of taking the hint that nothing good could come of his public temper tantrum, he decided to go it alone.

In the absence of any evidence that Dr. Hawk's peers were lending any significant support to his position, this should have been a non-news-story by any standard. Instead, it resulted in weeks of media coverage. And that coverage was stirred up quite deliberately through news media communications and even press conferences from the "usual suspects" who oppose doctors on the tort reform issue -- the trial lawyers themselves, so-called consumer groups that act as their fronts, and lawmakers allied with them. It was purely artificial outrage, because these groups knew there was no chance Dr. Hawk's resolution was going anywhere. And yet the resulting media coverage sometimes made it appear that there was a big trend under way and that the medical profession was on the point of endorsing a "don't-treat-trial-lawyers" campaign. Here in Pennsylvania, a Democratic lawmaker even introduced legislation to make it unlawful for a physician to refuse to treat a patient based on the patients' profession.

What happened at the ABA House of Delegates in Chicago? As it turned out, fellow physicians were so opposed to Dr. Hawk's measure that they never even voted on it -- he withdrew it by popular acclaim.

But the damage was done. Advocates of medical liability reform spent the summer doing damage control, lawmakers cited the episode and used it to defeat caps on noneconomic damages, and the resulting fallout has harmed medicine's cause more than anything else I've seen in recent years. Thanks a bunch, Dr. Hawk. -- Donna Baver Rovito, Allentown, Pa.

See also adjacent letter, and letters run Sept. 31 and Oct. 22, 2001. For a recent anecdote from Connecticut, see this Law.com account. -- ed.