A legislative move to limit nursing home lawsuits in the state was delayed yesterday after lawmakers directed the bill to a joint study committee.
Steve Flatt, an executive of National Health Care Corporation in Murfreesboro, says he’s disappointed by the outcome but eager to argue his case with lawmakers over the summer.
“We’ve got a real problem, a very acute problem, with liability costs that are more than three times the national average.”
Flatt says that nationally, nursing homes only spend about three cents of every treatment dollar for liability expenses. In Tennessee, that number is up around 11-cents per dollar.
Flatt’s bill, as worded now, would set a cap of 250-thousand dollars on what patients could get for non-economic damages such as ‘pain and suffering.’
AARP has lined up to oppose the move by Tennessee nursing homes, complaining that the caps make it tougher for patients to get fair compensation in some cases.
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The bill is HB 4053 Rinks/SB 4075 Tracy, and that draft version is expected to be the substance that is to be studied by the joint study committee.
In our previous story on this issue,
we gave substantial space to the arguments for and again such a tort reform bill.
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