Some of Colorado's leading voices on health policy--representing both parties and wide-ranging views--spoke out in unison today against a Democrat bill they said would drive up health-care costs and drive out doctors. They said the legislation, which just emerged Friday and is being fast-tracked through a committee today, comes ironically at the very time the state is trying to reform health care and rein in soaring costs.

Bill Lindsay, who chaired the bipartisan "208 commission" on health care reform, the GOP's Sen. Josh Penry, of Grand Junction, and Sen. Bob Hagedorn, an Aurora Democrat,

appeared at a morning news conference at the Capitol to denounce Senate Bill 164 as a gift to trial lawyers at the public's expense.

"This is the wrong step for Colorado at absolutely the wrong time," Lindsay said.

Lindsay, Penry and Hagedorn said the bill would drive up costs throughout the health-care system by loosening the current statutory restraints on lawsuits against doctors--creating a litigation-friendly climate that would drive up docs' liability-insurance premiums.

The three said the bill upsets the current balance that the law strikes between compensating patients for legitimate claims and ensuring that doctors still can afford to practice medicine, especially in some higher-risk specialties like obstetrics, neurosurgery and orthopedics. The current law, they said, has made Colorado the envy of other states where runaway lawsuits have driven doctors out of practice.

"This moves in exactly the wrong direction," Penry said of SB 164. "The crisis in health care is a crisis in cost," he said, noting that the bill is expected to drive up doctors' premiums 12-14 percent. "This throws gasoline on the fire."

Hagedorn, the veteran chair of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, chided the bill's backers for seeking to create a "wide-open tort system."

"We cannot continue down this road," he said. "If you bankrupt the system with litigation, you won't have the money to provide care."

Acknowledging he is out of synch with many members of his own party on the issue, Hagedorn said that "members of my party do not understand" the perils of the bill.

Lindsay said higher liability-insurance premiums have a ripple effect that drives up overall health-care costs in several ways.

• Higher liability premiums will be passed on to patients.
• As those premiums rise even higher, doctors eventually will leave their practices for other states--leaving more patients behind as they compete for fewer doctors.
• Mounting lawsuits against doctors--however frivolous--prompt them to practice "defensive medicine," in which they give patients costly, extra tests that are medically unnecessary but serve as a hedge against litigation.