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WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats blocked two Republican-sponsored measures supported by President Bush that would have limited what doctors would pay injured patients for pain and suffering in malpractice lawsuits.

Senate Republican leader Bill Frist, a cardiac surgeon before going into politics, fell 12 votes short of rounding up the 60 needed to proceed with consideration of the main measure. The companion bill failed by 11 votes. Republicans control the Senate 55-45.

The votes marked the fourth time since 2003 that Senate Democrats had blocked Republican attempts to set caps on malpractice awards.

"Year after year after year, we have tried to reform medical malpractice in this country, and the Senate has been the stumbling block," said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas.

The House of Representatives, also controlled by Republicans, has passed legislation to limit pain-and-suffering judgments to $250,000. The main Senate measure, sponsored by John Ensign, R-Nev., would have capped the amount patients could collect at $250,000 per defendant and up to $750,000 overall. The amount would be over and above any payments for actual expenses.

The companion measure, sponsored by Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., would have set a $250,000 cap on damages women could collect from obstetricians for malpractice.

Bush denounced the vote and blamed Democrats.

"Unwilling to take on their trial-lawyer supporters, the Democrats led this effort to block these much-needed reforms," the president said in a statement issued in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where he planned speeches on the Medicare prescription drug benefit. "It is time for the Senate to put the needs of the American people ahead of the interests of trial lawyers."

Democrats said the limits would help insurers and hurt patients. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada called the attempt by Republicans to bring up the measures an election-year "political stunt" to curry favor with insurance companies.

"There is a health-care crisis, but it has nothing to do with tort laws," Reid said. "The real problem is too much malpractice, not too much litigation."

Republicans said spiraling malpractice-insurance premiums due to frivolous lawsuits were driving doctors in high-risk specialties such as obstetrics and neurosurgery out of medicine.

"In Tennessee, 81 of 96 counties don't have a neurosurgeon," Frist said of his home state. "Half don't have an emergency physician" or an obstetrician, he said. "Nobody is going to move into those counties where premiums are sky-high."

Frist said "greedy predatory lawyers" had turned doctors' offices into "minefields" for physicians rather than "places of healing."

Tom Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, called the Senate action "irresponsible" and said it put "the interests of the trial bar above patients and doctors."

Ken Suggs, president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, said the legislation was "unfair to victims and limits their ability to hold wrongdoers accountable."