By Jim Messer, Partner

Every day clients, friends and business associates call and ask me about Amendment 3 and every day I tell them how bad Amendment 3 is for Florida. In fact, the proposed amendment is so bad, so deceptive, that Florida Supreme Court Justice Fred Lewis called Amendment 3 “a wolf in sheep’s clothing that will prevent citizens’ access to the courts.” Justice Lewis declared the amendment “patently misleading… [I]t pretends to protect victims from lawyers, when the amendment is really intended to protect doctors from legitimate lawsuits.”

While the special interests behind Amendment 3 claim it will give victims of medical malpractice a “fair share” – its real aim is to make sure victims never receive a share at all. Unfortunately for the victims of medical errors, Amendment 3 makes it nearly impossible for victims of medical errors to find a lawyer, even when a patient is killed or paralyzed.

Here is how it works. The amendment requires 70 percent of any award up to $250,000 to go to the client. Any fee above the $250,000 is limited to 10 percent of the award. On a one million dollar ($1,000,000) award, the lawyer is limited to a total fee of $150,000 – but wait, the average medical errors case requires $100,000 in costs to be fronted by the lawyer. The average case takes nearly four (4) years, and statistically the victim loses 84 percent of the time. So for a potential fee of $150,000, a lawyer must risk $100,000, knowing four out of five times he or she will lose.

No lawyer will be able to afford to represent victims of medical errors, and we, as citizens of the state of Florida, will have to pay for these medical errors. In fact, we already do. Medical errors force each family in Florida to pay an average of $517 dollars a year more in health care related costs. Amendment 3 will make this even worse, and that means higher insurance rates and higher health care costs for all Floridians.

Further, with no method of revealing medical errors, Amendment 3 will result in a devastating increase in medical injuries, which already claim over 11,000 lives in Florida each year.

Finally, Amendment 3 is a gift to insurance companies and HMOs that takes away your rights. It changes the medical liability system so that your right to hold the health care system accountable for a life-threatening medical error is virtually wiped out. Amendment 3 makes the medical liability system even worse by giving insurance companies even more of an unfair advantage over average citizens in Florida’s legal system.

As of the date of this newsletter, the Tallahassee Democrat, the Miami Herald, the Tampa Tribune, Florida Today, the Lakeland Ledger, the St. Petersburg Times, the Orlando Sentinel, the Orlando Business Journal, the Gainesville Sun, the Sarasota Herald Tribune, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the Daytona Beach News Journal and the Palm Beach Post have all recommended that voters vote “no” on Amendment 3. In fact no major newspaper in the state has endorsed the amendment. Learn more about the dangers of Amendment 3 at www.factson3.org and Vote “NO” on Amendment 3.

Although I wrote this article, I am required by federal law to state the following was a paid political advertisement sponsored by Floridians for Patient Protection, P.O. Box 1365, Tallahassee, FL 32302, and paid for in kind by Fonvielle Lewis Foote and Messer, 3375 Capital Circle, N.E., Tallahassee, Florida 32308.