As a way to control soaring premiums for medical liability insurance, the president urged federal lawmakers last week to limit the amount patients can be compensated if they're injured by doctors, hospitals or insurers to $250,000 for pain and suffering. He also advocated an unspecified cap on punitive awards.

James Duffy, a medical malpractice attorney, said it would be wrong to place caps on the compensation that the most seriously injured patients can receive.

Duffy made history last year when a jury awarded $80 million to the family of a twin girl who was born 10 weeks premature and now suffers from cerebral palsy.

"These are men, woman and children whose lives have been changed by the misconduct of medical providers," Duffy said.

Duffy, partner in Uniondale-based Duffy, Duffy & Burdo, has obtained more than 30 verdicts of $1 million or more and has negotiated more than 250 multi-million dollar settlements.

Joseph Awad, vice president of the New York State Trial Lawyers Association, said the association opposes any type of cap on malpractice awards because it displays a lack of faith in the jury system.

"These are the jurors who have dismantled AT&T - I think they know what they're doing," Awad said.

But David Richman, head of the medical litigation defense practice group at Uniondale-based Rivkin Radler, said trials have much more to do with theatre than the law. "The amounts being paid out are not in concert with the injury," he said.

Richman also noted that if damages were to be capped at $250,000, plaintiff attorneys would have to take a major pay cut. Their fees are often based on a percentage of the damages awarded by a jury. "It's usually the more they get [for their clients] the larger the fee," Richman said.

Lynda Lees Adams, a spokesperson for the Medical Society of State of New York, said limits on damages would help the medical marketplace.

"If we had caps, we wouldn't have such high insurance rates and doctors leaving their practices," Adams said.

A number of doctors in New Jersey and across the country are planning to suspend services to protest soaring malpractice premiums.

Adams said a cap on medical malpractice awards is the elixir the medical industry has needed for the past 30 years.

But Awad, who is also a partner in Garden City-based Silberstein, Awad & Miklos, maintained that the "malpractice crisis" is not in the courts, but in the insurance industry.

The industry is in crisis whenever its investments do poorly, and that's the case now, he said.