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2004 Budget Session
HB 173 proposed a way for the state of Wyoming to help doctors in Wyoming pay for their medical malpractice insurance.
HB 173 would establish a medical malpractice insurance fund, and would stock it with $10 million from the budget reserve account.
Any physician who had been licensed and practicing in Wyoming for at least one year could apply to the insurance commissioner for assistance in paying his or her medical malpractice insurance premium.
The insurance commissioner would compare the insurance rates of the applying doctor with the average of insurance rates for the same medical specialty or subspecialty in the states surrounding Wyoming. If the Wyoming physician's insurance rates were higher than average rates in surrounding states, the Wyoming doctor would receive assistance from the state in paying the difference.
Doctors who received such assistance would have to sign a contract with the state, in which they agreed to practice in Wyoming for the entire period of the contract for assistance, and to provide medical care for any Wyoming resident qualified under the Wyoming Medical Assistance and Services Act, the Wyoming Health Insurance Pool Act or the Wyoming uninsured child health insurance program who seeks medical care which the physician is qualified to provide.
Supporters of HB 173 noted that some rural areas of Wyoming have a hard time recruiting and retaining doctors, and that some doctors are closing their medical practices and leaving the state because they cannot afford medical malpractice insurance rates that have increased dramatically in recent years. They supported HB 173 as a way to counteract this problem, to hopefully maintain an adequate number of doctors in the state to meet the medical care needs of Wyoming citizens.
Some opponents noted that more physicians have actually established new practices in Wyoming than have retired or moved out-of-state in recent years, and that the problem of physicians leaving because of insurance rates has been overstated. Opponents also pointed out that the difficulty that some rural Wyoming areas have in recruiting and retaining doctors may be completely unrelated to insurance rates, but instead may be a factor of isolation, lack of urban amenities, etc.
Some opponents of HB 173 were only interested in actual tort reform, embodied in proposed constitutional amendments that would permit the setting of caps on the amount of damages a person could receive in medical malpractice lawsuits. These people believed that limiting medical malpractice lawsuits would cause malpractice insurance rates to decrease (or at least, stop going up), and they were simply not interested in helping doctors deal with malpractice insurance rates directly.
HB 173 passed the vote for Introduction in the House, 42-17 (1 excused) and was passed by the House Judiciary Committee, 7-2. The bill was not voted on by the Committee of the Whole in the House by the deadline for action, and so died.