Trial lawyers’ profits are skyrocketing, as is the damage they do to the health care industry – stifling research, forcing up costs, and driving doctors from the profession – according to a study issued yesterday by the Manhattan Institute.

Defenders of trial lawyers “typically will assert that tort litigation has a deterrent effect on risky or negligent activity, which it undoubtedly does, but in our current civil justice system it also deters any activity that might lead to high-cost law suits,which is not the same thing as actual risk,” the director of the institute’s Center for Legal Policy, James Copland, wrote in his introduction to the report, titled “Trial Lawyers, Inc.Health Care: The Lawsuit Industry’s Effect on American Health 2005.”

Malpractice liability costs rose to $26.5 billion in 2003 from $15.7 billion in 1995, the report states, leading insurance premiums to rise by 400%.As a result, Pennsylvania, a state particularly friendly to malpractice suits, lost more than a third of its general surgeons between 1995 and 2002, according to the study. Consumer groups blame insurance industry price gouging.

Medical malpractice reform “is the tip of the iceberg of a campaign on the part of big businesses to reduce their accountability to the public,” a spokeswoman for the Center for Justice and Democracy, Laurie Beacham, said.

With multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns and annual profits in excess of Pfizer’s, “Trial Lawyers, Inc. is as big a business as there is,” Mr.Copland told The New York Sun.

The report cites the decrease in vaccine manufacturers in the wake of lawsuits over the vaccine preservative Thimersol, and multibillion-dollar damages to the pharmaceutical manufacturers Wyeth, over the diet pill Fen-Phen, and Merck, over its drug Vioxx. Damages in those cases equal “nine to twelve times each company’s annual research and development costs,” it says.