Vote yes to lift malpractice cap

Proposition 46 makes patients safer and saves lives. As a doctor, I support Prop. 46 because it will detect and deter impaired doctors, and treats patients injured by medical errors more fairly.

I became addicted to prescription narcotics during my internal medicine residency and practiced medicine for years without anyone turning me in. Looking back, it scares me to death what I could have done.

Self-policing in the medical profession is nearly nonexistent. It’s one of the reasons I so strongly support Prop. 46, which would require periodic onthe-job drug and alcohol testing of doctors. Other public safety professions — pilots, truckers and police — are tested. Why not doctors?

Prop. 46 also cracks down on prescription drug abuse, now the nation’s fastest-growing drug epidemic. It requires doctors to check the existing statewide database before prescribing addictive painkillers. My friend Bob Pack from Danville, the proponent of Prop. 46, lost his two young children because no doctor checked on the history of a doctor-shopping drug addict before giving her thousands of pills. She fell asleep at the wheel, swerved off the road and killed Bob’s 7- and 10year-old children.

Bob found out after that tragedy that the life of a child killed by medical negligence is worth the same as it was in 1975, just $250,000. Prop. 46 updates the cap for inflation.