A five-year, $1 billion taxpayer subsidy to help Pennsylvania doctors buy medical malpractice insurance lapsed at the end of last month, forcing physicians to pay higher premiums unless Democrats and Republicans break an impasse over expanding a state health insurance program.
Gov. Ed Rendell supports a bill that passed the Democratic-led House on March 17 that would tie the future of the medical malpractice subsidy to approval of a $1 billion expansion of the health insurance program to cover an additional 220,000 adults who cannot afford other coverage.
But Republicans who control the Senate are critical of the health insurance provision, and encouraged the House instead to pass a bill approved by the Senate in December that will extend the medical malpractice subsidy through the end of 2008.
“We expect and hope the House will take up the bill they have and send it to Gov. Rendell so health care providers can have predictability,” Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, R-Delaware, said in an interview.
The Senate adjourned March 31 without acting on the bill sent over by the House.
In the House, Democrats thwarted a move by Republicans to bring the Senate bill to the floor. In addition to extending the malpractice subsidy, known as the MCare abatement, that bill would direct $50 million to help hospitals computerize records and institute infection-control practices.
Began in 2003
More than 35,000 doctors and other medical professionals originally won the malpractice insurance subsidy in 2003 when premiums surged by double-digit percentages annually before stabilizing in recent years.
To pay for it, the Legislature raised cigarette taxes by 25 cents per pack and siphoned money from a separate insurance fund fed by surcharges on traffic tickets. However, those funding sources have left a surplus, which would be tapped to help pay for the health insurance expansion.
The subsidy has saved the average primary care doctor $1,500 a year, while high risk specialists, including orthopedic surgeons, neurosurgeons and obstetricians, have saved an average of $15,000 a year, said Rendell spokeswoman Amy Kelchner.
First to feel the pinch will be doctors whose bills came due in the past three months. If legislators agree on an extension, those payments can be refunded, she said.
Dr. Theodore A. Christopher, chairman of emergency medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, said the bigger insurance bills will have a devastating effect. He said teaching hospitals will have less money for education and research, while some doctors will leave the state or retire.
Still, he noted that emergency physicians agree with the idea of expanding health insurance but “you can’t put this on the backs of the physicians.”
Republican leader Sam Smith of Jefferson County, said that the Rendell administration is putting the state’s medical professionals at risk by tying the two programs together.
Rep. Bill DeWeese, the House Democratic leader, responded that the House bill would guarantee the malpractice subsidy for another decade, “not a one-year solution that the Senate has foisted upon us.”
Pileggi and other Senate Republicans, however, question whether the legislation to expand the state’s health insurance program will cost far more than the Rendell administration says, and they say its potential effect on the private insurance market has not been studied.
Topics Pennsylvania
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