SALEM (AP) - As the 2003 legislative session heads into June and lawmakers step up their pace to adjourn, a proposal to limit medical malpractice damage awards is on life support.

Doctors say caps on such awards are needed because unrestricted jury awards are driving up malpractice insurance costs and causing physicians to retire early or to drop high-risk specialties like obstetrics.

But a lawmaker who proposed the limits said the effort is going nowhere because of heavy opposition from the Oregon Trial Lawyers Association. The association and others say it's wrong to limit how much a person can be awarded when they are injured as a result of someone else's negligence.

"It's dead," Sen. Frank Morse of Albany said of his proposed ballot measure that would let lawmakers clamp a lid on jury verdicts for noneconomic - often called pain and suffering - damages.

A companion bill that the Republican lawmaker drafted would have limited noneconomic medical malpractice damages to $300,000 if voters had passed the ballot measure.

For years, the issue has pitted doctors against lawyers who sue medical providers and sometimes gain muiltimillion-dollar awards for patients.

The Oregon Supreme Court in 1999 struck down a $500,000 ceiling on noneconomic damages on grounds the lid violated a state constitutional right to have juries decide damages.

So voter passage of a constitutional amendment would be needed to allow damage limits. Oregonians rejected such a measure in 2000 by a 3-to-1 statewide vote.

Oregon Medical Association chief lobbyist Scott Gallant said there's a chance that doctors and other damage limit advocates might try to put the issue on the ballot by initiative petition.

Gallant said because there's public mistrust of the Legislature, voters might be more receptive to a measure that would have them set a damage limit instead of leaving it to lawmakers.

"It probably would be just as ugly a fight," he said, as the multimillion-dollar battle over the measure that was defeated three years ago.

Gallant said he's not sure that lawyer influence was the only reason that Morse's malpractice damage limit measure is going nowhere.

"The Legislature is dealing with such problems with the budget that it never rose to the level of being a priority," he said.

The spokesman for the trial lawyers' group, Chris Bouneff, said the voters' verdict in 2000 is the reason that lawmakers aren't interested in sending a similar measure back to the ballot.

"The vote wasn't even close," Bouneff said. "The battle is over on that."