Thursday afternoon, Consumer Watchdog, an offshoot of the Consumer Attorneys of California, announced that their anti-Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act (MICRA) proposition has qualified for the November ballot. The measure has significant implications for local governments concerned about the cost of health care and access to doctors, community clinics and hospitals. The main provision of the lawyers’ ballot measure will quadruple MICRA’s non-economic damages cap from $250,000 to nearly $1.1 million. 

MICRA was signed into law by former and current Governor Jerry Brown in 1975 in an effort to curtail runaway non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases. Medical malpractice insurance was becoming prohibitively expensive and difficult to obtain in California, especially for certain specialties such as obstetrics. This in turn was driving physicians in numerous specialties out of California making access to those services difficult if not completely unavailable in many parts of the state—especially rural areas.

MICRA caps any non-economic damages award at $250,000. There remains no limit on awards for actual damages including costs of ongoing care, loss of income, or punitive damages under MICRA.

The most threatening outcome of altering MICRA in rural areas is a loss of access to health care. Increasing costs to local providers, community clinics, and local hospitals could force them to reduce services or cease providing services altogether. Access to healthcare—especially specialty services--is already a serious problem in rural areas and a change to MICRA would exacerbate this situation dramatically. 

RCRC will be evaluating the language of the qualified ballot measure and the Board of Directors will take an official position at a future meeting. A broad coalition of doctors, hospitals, community health clinics, local governments, nurses, business, labor, and others (including RCRC) have long supported the existing MICRA law as a protector of access to care, and have opposed previous attempts to alter the structure of it. 

For additional information, please contact RCRC Legislative Advocate Cyndi Hillery at (916) 447-4806 orchillery@rcrcnet.org.