Dear Governor McGreevey:

On behalf of the New Jersey State Bar Association (NJSBA), I respectfully urge you to conditionally veto ACS-50 (Roberts/Cohen/Weinberg/McKeon/Watson-Coleman), "New Jersey Medical Care Access and Responsibility and Patients First Act", to delete the current provision imposing a fee assessment on attorneys. This association, the largest of its kind in the state, represents the interests of a diverse and dynamic community of attorneys who represent plaintiffs and defendants in civil and criminal matters, corporate and business interests, family and probate issues, land use and election law, to name a few.

We are strongly opposed to any bill that would unfairly assess all attorneys, the vast majority of whom have nothing at all to do with medical malpractice. While we recognize that access to competent medical care throughout the State is an issue of critical importance to the Legislature and serves the public good, we oppose the legislative scheme that seeks to shift the burden of providing a financial solution from State government to the private Bar. As lawyers, we are concerned that such efforts establish a dangerous precedent that may be repeated at the next 'crisis'. This type of bailout of doctors by lawyers in inappropriate and is a band-aid approach to a deep and complex problem.

Lawyers already pay an annual assessment through the New Jersey Client Security Fund to support the Supreme Court-implemented ethics system governing attorney conduct and compensating victims of attorney malfeasance. Further, attorneys bear the cost of skyrocketing legal malpractice insurance premiums, and many lawyers shoulder heavy student loan payments without the benefit of bailout funded by doctors.

The assessment penalizes lawyers for what we are supposed to do - protect the interests of clients and seek redress for injuries. That is precisely why the public turns to attorneys. This legislation makes it more expensive for lawyers to serve the public, their clients.

There is no nexus between the overwhelming majority of attorneys who will be assessed under the bill and those who will benefit from medical malpractice reform. The current arbitrary list of groups assessed in the bill oddly misses others, such as nurses, emergency medical technician workers and hospital administrators, for example, who have close involvement in medical malpractice negligence matters, but are not assessed under the bill. Any rational assessment should fairly spread the burden to all licensed professionals equally, instead of the current capricious list.

Assemblyman Neil Cohen, a sponsor of the bill, has recently said, the medical malpractice issue is due, in part, to "bad business decisions by what has been the state's biggest malpractice insurer." Whether this is in fact the case, or whether a downturn in the stock market is to blame, such are matters best explored in the light of reason and analysis by experts in the field before legislation is enacted. This is a point we have made consistently, and it has been echoed by some of the major newspapers in New Jersey. The impact of this bill will penalize the private Bar generally for a public health issue, better addressed through State governmental action. Nor is there any guarantee by insurance companies that medical malpractice premiums will stabilize, or better still, decrease as a result of the passage of this bill.

We are fully supportive of premium relief for doctors in specialty practices and geographic areas who have seen dramatic increases. However, relief must be accompanied by built-in accountability and strict government enforcement.

The facts remain clear. According to the State Administrative Office of the Courts, the number of medical malpractice cases has been declining. These cases represent less than two percent of all civil lawsuits filed in state courts. Most cases are settled. And doctors win the vast majority of cases that do go to trial (151 out of 205 jury verdicts in 2002).