There's much more at stake in New York's never-ending battle for tort reform than the bank balances of bad doctors or greedy lawyers.

Doctors say multimillion dollar judgments in negligence lawsuits are pushing malpractice insurance premiums so high that some physicians are cutting the services they offer or are leaving the state. They want to restrict what patients can collect.

Trial lawyers don't want any limits on damages patients can be awarded. Such restrictions, they say, would be unfair to victims of medical negligence, some of whom might face a lifetime of lost wages and expensive medical bills because of their doctors' carelessness.

Both sides have valid points. But they and their allies in the state Legislature have been arguing back and forth for years, with little prospect for resolution.

Lawmakers would be wise to seriously consider legislation modeled after laws that, overall, appear to have worked well in California and about three-dozen other states. Such legislation would place caps on non-economic damages, like for pain and suffering, but still allow high awards to compensate patients for lost wages and the like due to negligence.

Indeed, a Government Accountability Office study found that obstetricians, internists and surgeons in states with such caps saw their malpractice premiums rise only a third as much as those in other states.

The Medical Society of the State of New York is pushing for a cap of $250,000 on pain-and-suffering awards. President Bush advocates a similar amount for a proposed national law. But that is probably too low.

In California, which had a $250,000 cap in effect for 30 years, victims of medical negligence or their families have had trouble finding lawyers willing to take their cases. That's because lawyers typically are paid one-third of the total award victims receive.

Expenses for expert witnesses and other high-cost necessities to presenting a case sometimes come out of the lawyer's share. A $250,000 cap just doesn't make financial sense for some lawyers.

Such a cap, too, unfairly discriminates against poor or elderly victims who can't demonstrate substantial future economic loss but who, nonetheless, could experience pain and emotional distress for the rest of their lives.

It would only be fair, then, to allow greater leeway in awarding damages for pain and suffering. But there has to be some kind of reasonable cap. The consequences to medical care would be too profound if the sky's the limit.

The Legislature should undertake a thorough analysis to determine how high that cap should be. Then it should set its sights on preventing the kinds of reckless medical errors that force patients into court in the first place.