A bill backed by Republican lawmakers with financial ties to the health care industry that would have limited medical malpractice payouts has been overhauled after a wave of outcry from families and patients.
The bill, HB503, is sponsored by Rep. Katy Hall, R-South Ogden, and would have capped payouts to victims at $1 million, a standard that some Utah families said could have been devastating. A new version of the bill released Friday removed the cap on payouts and would instead require doctors to have insurance if they want to protect their personal assets.
The changes were a major victory for a group of parents, patients and advocates who have been organizing in opposition to the bill.
Ashton Hyde, an attorney who works with a lobbying organization for Utah trial lawyers called the Utah Association of Justice and who has been involved in work on the bill, said in an interview that he thought the devastating personal stories shared by parents and patients in a committee meeting last Tuesday were a central reason for the amendments, particularly after a Senate version of the same bill was pulled from a committee agenda late last week.
“Everybody there, including these injured patients, was ready to go, and then they pulled it from the agenda thirty minutes before,” Hyde said in an interview. “It’s kind of like icing the kicker. They don’t want to give us a chance to talk.”
Among those who spoke against the bill at the House Business, Labor, and Commerce Committee hearing last week was Melissa Hansen. In 2001, Melissa’s son Oakley, who was born with spina bifida and hydrocephalus, suffered a traumatic brain injury and was left a quadriplegic after health care providers failed to realize his external shunt was blocked.
The experience, his mother said, was like losing “a part of our souls that we can never get back.”
Oakley is now 30 years old and requires around-the-clock care. The Hansen family ultimately filed a medical malpractice lawsuit and won a settlement, the terms of which Hansen can’t disclose, but she estimates that Oakley’s care costs her family about $1 million a year. The proposed cap originally included in HB503 would have been catastrophic for her family, she said.
“We have never been on a family vacation. We cannot travel,” she said in an interview. “That money has not made us wealthy. That money has not benefited us other than the support we need to survive.”
A number of other parents and patients echoed her concerns in an emotional series of testimonies.
“This bill is to protect the rich, not the victim,” said Matt Corry, a 46-year-old father of five who had a thiamine deficiency that doctors failed to diagnose for six weeks, a delay that he said left him with difficulty speaking and in a wheelchair. “I cannot be a father to my children because of what has been taken,” he said. “I cannot support them. Without this money, I would be dead.”
Despite the wave of opposition, lawmakers on the House committee favorably recommended the bill last week by a vote of 10-4.
“This is a really, really tough subject, and I see that there are needs on both sides of this argument. I am not comfortable voting for this on the floor as-is,” Rep. Jason Kyle, R-Huntsville, the committee’s vice chair, said last week. “I do think it needs more work … but I know that the sponsor will work those things out before [it comes to the floor].”
Ultimately, despite the changes to the bill, Kyle was among a number of Republicans who broke with the sponsor and GOP leadership Friday to vote against it on the floor, where the amended bill passed 41-25 in one of the most divisive floor votes of the 2025 session.
A priority for Republican leadership
But to pass any version of the bill was also a victory for Republican leadership in both chambers, who have indicated that it’s a priority to pass it in some form before the session ends Friday.
Last week, House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, called in to the committee to vote in favor of the bill — a rare move for the GOP leader — but he, too, expressed hesitation about its original construction. “I was listening to it and understand some of those concerns, and I, quite frankly, share some of those concerns,” he told reporters Thursday, adding that he felt the measure was needed to get “the costs under control” for Utahns.
Two people involved in work on the bill also said that one doctor who testified in favor of the bill, Steven Meek, was a friend of Senate President Stuart Adams.
In a statement to The Salt Lake Tribune, Adams said he has long been passionate about tort reform and helped shape Utah’s medical malpractice law through bills he ran more than a decade ago. But Adams said he wasn’t aware until Meek told him a few weeks ago that a key provision of Utah’s malpractice law was ruled unconstitutional in 2019. That Utah Supreme Court ruling centered around what is called a prelitigation panel, which is a process where someone who wants to sue their doctor must first present their case to a panel run by the Division of Professional Licensing.
That panel then rules whether the case has merit or not, but most often, the panel sides with the doctor. Prior to 2019, a patient who received a non-meritorious opinion would then have to find an expert who would write a letter affirming the validity of their claim — but the Utah Supreme Court found this was unconstitutionally blocking access to the courts. Today, a patient still needs to go to a prelitigation panel but can file a lawsuit regardless of the panel’s opinion.
“After learning about the court ruling, I want to work on developing a policy that both reduces medical costs and aligns with the court’s decision,” Adams said. “I became aware that others in the House were already working on the issue, so I joined discussions, as is typical in the legislative process.”
Adams has financial ties to multiple medical centers and Davis Hospital, according to his conflict of interest disclosures. Hall, the bill’s sponsor, is a registered nurse, according to her own disclosures, and her husband is a doctor who owns shares in two Utah surgical centers and sits on the board of another regional medical center.
In a statement to The Tribune, Hall said, “I want to be clear — this legislation will have no impact on me or my husband. As a healthcare provider, my priority has always been, and will continue to be, delivering the highest quality care to my patients. Nothing in this bill will change that commitment.”
“This issue was brought to me by fellow medical professionals who are struggling with mounting insurance costs,” she added, “and my goal is to ensure that we find a balanced policy solution that supports both providers and patients.”
Hall said Monday the changes to the bill “incorporated much of the feedback we’ve received from shareholders,” and the goal of the bill — lowering costs of and increasing access to care — remained the same.
Personal injury and medical malpractice attorney Eric Nielson said he was angry to see lawmakers running bills that could benefit the industries in which they work or are invested.
“I wish I could tell you how offensive it is to me that the president of the Senate is running a very self-interested bill,” Nielson said. “He’s got a conflict and so does Katy. They’re doing this to protect themselves.”
‘It’s about protecting the insurance industry’
While proponents of the bill’s original cap provision argued its passage would benefit doctors, several attorneys opposed to the legislation said the real beneficiary would be insurance companies. Nielson told The Tribune his firm recently settled two malpractice cases, one for $3.75 million and another for $4.5 million. Had this bill been law, Nielson said, the insurer would have paid a fraction of that amount.
“It’s about protecting the insurance company,” Nielson said. “My head almost exploded on Tuesday when I heard that bulls--- that this is about helping the community doctor lower his premium, and this is about helping the community doctor get back to practicing medicine instead of defending a lawsuit. That’s nonsense. It’s the insurance company that drags the case out.”
Nielson said that while the updated bill is better than the original, he still sees the bill as a giveaway to the insurance industry, as the provision giving doctors personal immunity would take away the leverage he has to win verdicts above and beyond the policy limits.
At least one doctor agreed. “The soft story of ‘Doctors are under attack’ is completely directing the attention away from the real problem here,” hospitalist Ryan Coil said in an interview, “which is that insurance is just trying to keep more of their money.”
Coil testified in opposition to the bill last week as well, saying bluntly: “The people who are advocating for this bill are individuals who spend time on beaches in Hawaii annually, or insurance companies that are making billions of dollars. Please look after Utah and the people who need this money.”
HB503, in its substituted and amended form, will be considered by a Senate committee later this week before a full vote of the chamber. This Friday is the final day of the 2025 legislative session.
