BY MORRIS PONGRATZ
Los Alamos

Let’s start with the bad
I am currently the president of the Los Alamos Retiree Group. We meet for breakfast on the first Tuesday of the month. Invariably I hear someone moan about losing their doctor to Colorado, or Texas, or retirement, because of the prohibitive cost of malpractice liability Insurance. At our last breakfast I circulated a petition urging our elected representatives to reform New Mexico’s Medical Malpractice law. One hundred percent of the attendees signed the petition!

Some examples, my wife’s primary care is stopping. Our Nexus doctors are gone. My urologist is leaving. A friend’s wife had an emergency over the holidays. It required two trips to the ER and a visit to a doctor. in SF. None of these people could do anything for her. She needed surgery, which should have been fairly minor but virtually no one in New Mexico was available. They ended up airlifting her to Denver for what should have been a fairly routine procedure. Another one, my golfing buddy went skiing, broke a leg, and there were no beds in Santa Fe or Albuquerque, and he ended up being airlifted to El Paso.

Now, the good
I commend our County Council for making number one on their state legislative agenda “Improved access to behavioral health and availability of medical professionals including but not limited to interjurisdictional compacts and options for malpractice reform.”

More good news, at the recent 2026 Legislative Preview hosted by the League of Women Voters of Los Alamos (LWVLA) and American Association of University Women (AAUW). Rep. Christine Chandler said she did a deep dive into the bill and went around and talked to people who actually practice medical malpractice litigation. She said, “What I found out was we are out of alignment. with what Colorado and Arizona do.” She is preparing legislation to address the problems with New Mexico’s medical malpractice laws.

But there’s still the ugly
Legislation to change our medical malpractice laws must go through the Senate Judiciary Committee, but the chair of Senate Judiciary committee, Sen. Joe Cervantes, D-Las Cruces, is a trial lawyer, and his firm handles medical malpractice lawsuits. Talk about Conflict of Interest!!! The Santa Fe New Mexican columnist, Milan Simonich writes that Senator Cervantes “who lords over a committee can single-handedly kill a proposal by ignoring it.” (‘Vetoes’ kill chance for better universities | Local News | santafenewmexican.com)

I call upon Senate Majority Leader, Peter Wirth, D-Santa Fe, to use his influence to ensure that this vital legislation gets a prompt and open hearing before his committee.