Smith said he feels any cap on malpractices awards, and the status of any law enacted will eventually be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

"The system we have in place that allows an average person to stand on a level playing field with some of the most powerful lobbying corporations in the world," said Paul Lyon, executive director of The Committee for Justice for All, the group that hosted the event. "They used to call a lawyer's contingency fee the poor man's key to the courthouse, I think it is the key to the courthouse for everybody except the most wealthy, because who can afford to pay an hourly fee? It's an important system to salvage."

Smith and Lyon attempted to discredit some of the arguments made in favor of caps on insurance settlements. They presented evidence from the Congressional Budget Office that showed that in 2003, malpractice costs accounted for only 2 percent of all health care costs in the United States. They further argued that in states with caps on damages, malpractice insurance costs were higher than in states without a cap on insurance costs.

"These allegations that are being made around the country, we are hearing that lawsuits are being called `junk' or `frivolous,'" Smith said. "I haven't heard the President of the United States, when he used those terms, cite a single case.

"The fact is as we hear these words, people are not getting the facts," he continued. "There is medical negligence in this country. There are 98,000 deaths a year from it, and that is a government statistic from the (National Academy of Sciences') Institute of Medicine."

Smith and Lyon argued that rises in insurance premiums in recent years had much more to do with the corresponding dip in the stock market rather than malpractice awards.

""When the markets go south for the insurance industry, because that is where they make their money, all of a sudden they have a need for cash," Smith said. "What are they going to do? They're going to raise insurance premiums, which is what they did for a few years."

In recent months it was not uncommon to walk into a doctor's office and see a poster saying that the cost of malpractice insurance was driving doctors out of Pennsylvania. It is a contention that Smith and Lyon disputed.