Washington Post Editorial: Mr. Ehrlich's Risky Rx ("Ready, Fire, Aim")

[Bertha Venation]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30341-2004Dec27.html

IT IS ALL WELL and good that Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) is in the thick of the rethinking in Annapolis about the state's medical malpractice insurance system. But in calling for a special session of the General Assembly today he asks lawmakers to swallow a financially irresponsible plan. The governor and most legislators agree that the state needs to create a special fund to temper doctors' insurance costs, but if yesterday's Senate and House hearings are any indication of what's to come, the governor's slapdash summons to Annapolis offers more of a political booby trap than a fiscally sound solution to the malpractice insurance problem.

It's not that the makings of a workable restructuring of the system are missing from Mr. Ehrlich's proposals. Most of the changes that he and the Democratic leaders in the House and Senate propose can be hammered into some sort of stopgap compromise. But setting stricter limits on noneconomic "pain and suffering" awards to victims of medical malpractice and establishing a state fund to cover excess costs will require some three-way give-and-take among the governor and leaders of the two legislative bodies, even if it can't be done in a high-speed special session.

Having announced his proposal on the eve of a holiday weekend -- and only yesterday plopping down the printed 55-page bill -- Mr. Ehrlich is still refusing to specify how he would finance the necessary special fund. Democratic leaders have proposed lifting the state tax exemption granted to HMOs in the 1970s; a 2 percent levy on HMO premiums would generate about $80 million. Mr. Ehrlich repeated his opposition to the HMO tax yesterday, sticking to his proposal to take the money from somewhere in the general fund -- but with not even a clue as to which programs might be cut or killed to help produce the money, only a notation that the budget outlook had improved considerably.

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With a projected budget deficit of more than $300 million in the general fund budget of $10 billion, why should lawmakers blindly go along with Mr. Ehrlich's secret, "trust me" malpractice funding plan? It is, in the words of Sen. Brian E. Frosh (D-Montgomery), who headed a panel that recommended malpractice changes, another proposal from the "ready, fire, aim department of the Ehrlich administration."