. 

Dr. Featured In Bush "Frivolous Lawsuits" Speech, Has Settled Four Malpractice Claims Since 1998.

BY HOWARD M. UNGER

Dr. Denise Baker of Bradenton sat behind first lady Laura Bush Tuesday night as President Bush asked Congress to limit medical malpractice awards in "frivolous lawsuits."

Baker said lawsuits against her were partially to blame for higher insurance rates that forced her to quit delivering babies. She has settled four malpractice claims since 1998, totaling more than $600,000.

Bradenton resident Bill Bartram and his wife, Phyllis, filed one of those lawsuits.

"Frivolous? (My wife) almost died," said Bartram, 61. He and his 55-year-old wife settled their suit in December 2000.

"My wife has a scar on her stomach as big as a fist," after an operation in 1998 in which her bowel was punctured, Bartram said. Bartram said he saw Baker's picture in the paper Wednesday and was outraged.

"I'm a Democrat, but I think the Republicans are putting politics in their medicine without checking out their doctors," he said.

In an interview with The Associated Press Wednesday, Baker referred to none of her patients by name, but she described a case in which she slightly punctured a woman's bowel during laparoscopic surgery.

"If you drive a car long enough, you're eventually going to have an accident," she said. "It's not me. The scales of justice are out of balance."

Mainly because of those claims, Baker's annual insurance premiums rose from $58,000 to $200,000 last year, she said.

Instead of moving to another state, where she could get coverage for about $8,000 a year, Baker kept her gynecology practice in Bradenton.

In recent months, she has advocated the capping of medical malpractice jury awards. Two weeks ago, she met President Bush at a Pennsylvania conference on insurance.

The president's brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, supports a bill in the state Legislature that caps noneconomic awards such as pain and suffering, to $250,000. It would not affect "economic awards" such as those for a victim's expected future earnings.

Florida is one of 13 states in the throes of a medical liability crisis. Nationally, insurers have paid more in recent years to cover lawsuits and malpractice settlements, leading some doctors to stop delivering babies or to quit the profession entirely.

But many experts cite other factors, including poor investment returns and the insurers' own business practices, for making significant contributions to the premium increases.

Even representatives of the insurance industry blame factors other than jury verdicts.

In addition, figures collected by the federal government show that court judgments in malpractice cases have not risen nearly as fast as some advocates of new limits have asserted. In fact, the average size of judgments against doctors and other health care workers dropped in the first nine months of 2002, according to the government numbers.

A Sarasota lawyer who sued Baker in 1999 after his client's cervical surgery said President Bush could have chosen a better person to represent doctors.

"We settled our case for $225,000. I don't think that's frivolous," said Roger Lutz, who represented Kathryn Giard of Manatee County, who had Baker perform laser surgery.

"Dr. Baker is as much a cause of the problem as anybody," Lutz said. "It's incredible that she put herself front and center and sat by Laura Bush."

In 1998, a woman who lost her baby after birth sued Baker and another obstetrician. The doctors settled for $250,000 each, according to Manatee County court records. Manatee Memorial Hospital settled for $4.9 million.

Baker, who was not the primary doctor, was named late to the lawsuit, which was settled in January 2000.

She said she was called for emergency assistance after the woman's uterus ruptured during childbirth.

"I walked in the room. I helped that patient … I was the one that carried that limp, pale baby over and started the resuscitation," she told the AP.

"It was a very bad outcome for that patient," she added. "You just go ahead and settle."

Source: the Herald-Tribune newspaper

HOME