Tort reform is a scam that punishes people to protect profits.
While our Congress is busy pandering to big business, it seems that the boys and girls who run the European Union are fighting for consumer rights. Business Insurance reports that the European Union wants to:
- Make it easier for consumers to file antitrust lawsuits.
- Create (not eliminate!) special types of class-action lawsuits.
- Eliminate roadblocks in their justice system.
At least one group of politicians understands the need to keep big business in check. Too bad they're on the other side of the pond.
The same pharmaceutical industry that brought us such wonderful medicines as Oraflex, Fen-Phen, Zyprexa, and Vioxx have now been granted immunity for any hastily-developed vaccines they may develop.
The Center for Justice and Democracy summed it up thusly: Today, the U.S. Congress, in a grotesque display of pandering to corporate America, enacted sweeping immunity for drug companies that produce unsafe vaccines and other drugs, leaving average Americans with no recourse if they have been hurt and creating a grave risk to public health in the event of a disease pandemic. This unprecedented legislation was enacted even though this dangerous and cruel provision was contained in neither House nor Senate passed bills, but rather was buried deep in the Defense Appropriation legislation.
While I certainly identify myself as a Democrat, it's too bad that only issues like Arctic drilling can prompt my party to filibuster. Yes, yes - I understand that this was a critical bill and all that. But someday, I hope to see a Democratic politician with the gumption to stand up and fight against such vicious tort reform.
Apparently, Tiger and the rest of the heartless bastards at the ATRA just issued the 2005 Judicial Hellholes report. Somehow, I missed the story on the web, but I did manage to catch it on Fox News.
UPDATE:
I was absolutely flabbergasted to learn that the ATRA admittedly made an error in the newest judicial hellhole report. From the Charleston Gazette: "Critics of West Virginia’s civil justice system this week conceded that they wrongly attacked state courts for a chemical exposure lawsuit that was not filed here.
The suit, filed in Florida and 13 other states, alleges that DuPont Co. exposed thousands of consumers to toxic chemicals used to make Teflon nonstick coatings.
Citing the DuPont suit, the American Tort Reform Association bumped West Virginia up a spot in its annual “Judicial Hellholes” report, from fourth last year to third in 2005.
Victor Schwartz, a lawyer and spokesman for the association, said the group learned from a Gazette reporter that the DuPont case was not filed in West Virginia.
“This is an error,” Schwartz said in a phone interview Tuesday evening."
That's the best part about preparing propaganda - you don't need to check your facts!
Detroit's Metro Times has an article that theorizes why John Engler is the current President of NAM: "Let’s suppose your doctor prescribes some spiffy new drug for your pimples, say, or your aching back. Unfortunately, it turns out to have some minor side effect, like it makes you totally blind. Or kills you.
Whoops. Guess the drug company didn’t experiment enough on those rabbits. Or maybe it didn’t work the same on people. It’s always something. But, hey, you can sue the pharmaceutical firm for what it did to you or yours, right?
Sure you can — in every state in the union except one. That’s right. Mississip— uh, Michigan! That’s right. Big pharmaceutical companies have total immunity in this state — as long as their drugs have been approved by the FDA, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration...
We can thank Gov. John Engler for that. Ten years ago, he rammed through a law that prevents us from suing any pharmaceutical company whose drug has been approved by the FDA.
Wonder why he now has a cushy, high-paying job as head of the National Association of Manufacturers?"
The article also describes the efforts of Republican Ed Gaffney to undo the damage done by Engler: "He was shocked when he learned Michigan wouldn’t allow damaged residents to sue drug companies. “This is tort reform run amok,” Gaffney says. (Emphasis added.)
He has introduced his own legislation. Drug companies would be presumed innocent, but if you could prove their product had harmed you, you could successfully sue. Yet so far, he can’t get the time of day from House Speaker Craig DeRoche, a Novi Republican who’s young enough to be his son.
“I’m sure this would pass if we can ever get it to the floor for a vote,” Gaffney says. Republicans have only a 58-51 majority, and a number of them feel as Gaffney does. As far as I can tell, all the Democrats want the change."
As a former staffer for a Democratic legislator here in Michigan, I can assure you this bill will get a floor vote over Craig DeRoche's dead body.
It's also worth noting that many tort reformers want federal legislation that mirrors Michigan's. In their eyes, you should never be able to sue a drug manufacturer if the FDA approved the drug - even if it is revealed that the manufacturer falsified data to get the drug approved.
Randy Cunningham is a scoundrel and a traitor to his country. Judge Alito is an accomplished jurist who deserves respect - even if you disagree with his judicial philosophy. So what in the world could those two have in common?
John Engler, the President of the National Associationof Manufacturers (NAM) and NAM endorse both of them.
Earlier this week, I wrote to Mr. Engler to ask him why his organization continues to endorse convicted felon Randy Cunningham. To date, there has been no response.
News on the NAM endorsement of Alito here.
The Idaho Statesman tells the story of an 82 year old veteran with Alzheimers that was grossly taken advantage of by Lithia Ford, a Fortune 1000 company. From the article: "A lawsuit filed Monday alleges Lithia Ford of Boise violated an Idaho law that protects consumers from "unconscionable contracts" by taking advantage of an 82-year-old man's dementia.
The lawsuit contends a Lithia salesman convinced Frank Baxter to swap his $32,000 SUV for a $15,000 economy car on Sept. 9 by taking advantage of Baxter's "inability to understand, and other factors due to his age and dementia.
The lawsuit claims the Lithia Ford contract with Baxter also was unconscionable because the dealership knew it was getting a vehicle that had been driven only 16 miles by Baxter and had a value of $31,253, in exchange for a 2006 Ford Focus valued at $15,215...
The suit also alleges that the dealership should have realized Baxter was not capable of entering into such an agreement because he was so disoriented at the time that a Lithia Ford employee had to drive him home."
I wonder what kind of commission you get when you make $15k on a trade-in by taking advantage of a war veteran who lives in the Alzheimer's ward of a nursing home. I hope for Boise's sake that they don't give the man his money back or Tiger and the rest of the heartless bastards might declare a state of emergency in Idaho and label Boise a Judicial Hellhole.
Few news stories are more yawn-inducing to the general public than a story about a federal agency changing its regulations. Too bad, because that's sometimes a shortcut to tort reform.
Safety Lex reports and expands upon a WaPo article that details an attempt to take away your right to sue auto manufacturers: "In other words, adoption of the agency's proposed standards will cause injured parties in all fifty states to lose their common law tort rights. The change of tactics by the White House to achieve tort reform without Congressional input raises questions concerning the scope of federal agencies' power to legislate substantive changes to state law."
It's an informative read with good background material. Check it out.
From 1010wins.com: "A judge declared a mistrial Monday in the first federal lawsuit over the once-popular painkiller Vioxx.
Merck & Co. emerged from its third Vioxx trial Monday with a hung jury when the panel failed, in about 18 hours of deliberations over three days, to side with the drug maker or the widow of a 53-year-old Florida man who died after taking Vioxx for about a month.
The jury resumed what was to be its fourth day of deliberations Monday, but within about 20 minutes, U.S. District Judge Eldon Fallon called the jurors in and reminded them they had agreed to reach a verdict in a ``reasonable time.''
"It has now been a reasonable time. We cannot get a verdict,'' Fallon said, declaring a mistrial. Federal litigation requires a unanimous verdict."
Let's see... four down, 7,996 lawsuits to go.
MP3 Newswire comments upon a legal "victory" for the recording industry: "A federal US appeals court has upheld a $22,500 judgment against Cecilia Gonzalez, a 29-year-old Chicago mother and a victim in one of the first Big Four p2p file sharing cases.
The mother of five children, in September, 2003, she was among the first 261 people to be named at the beginning of by the Big Four Organized Music cartel's twisted sue 'em all marketing campaign."
Look, I agree that downloading music is, for lack of a softer word, stealing. But these penalties are ridiculous - the woman has to pay $750 for each song she downloaded. That's hardly justified considering the value of the songs is, at best, $20 each. (Valuing the song equal to the whole album.)
One statement in the article raises my curiosity: "The cartel implies it's successfully "prosecuted" some 17,000 people when in reality, not one of them, including Gonzalez, has ever been before a judge. And not one of them, including Gonzalez, has ever been found guilty of anything by a jury of their peers."
I wonder if that's true. If it is, you've no idea how tempted I am to get myself sued by the RIAA...
Greedy Trial Lawyer (informative, if a bit tongue-in-cheek) quotes a very scary WaPo article: "A growing number of U.S. hospitals, including at least eight in the Washington area, are saving money by reusing medical devices designated for one-time use, ignoring the warnings of manufacturers, which will not vouch for the safety of their reconditioned products."
Depending upon how profitable this practice is for a hospital, this might be a great example of Buying The Tort.
Instead of passing more laws that put profits ahead of patients, how about some Federal legislation to prohibit this practice?
Recently, a group of pharmacists working for Walgreen’s filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that Walgreen’s is discriminating against them by forcing them to follow state law and dispense “morning after pills.” The pharmacists argue that since their religion forbids abortion, they cannot dispense this medication, and to force them to do so is discriminatory.
There are two ways to examine this issue, an easy way, and a hard way. The easy way is to point out that Illinois state law requires the pharmacists to dispense the drug, and that they surely cannot expect Walgreen’s to disobey a state law. This analysis leads to the conclusion that the pharmacists should challenge the constitutionality of the state law, not Walgreen’s. So for the duration of this post, I’ll simply ignore the state law (as the pharmacists do) and focus on the larger issue.
Should an employer be allowed to force an employee to perform job duties that are prohibited by that employee’s religion? This case is getting so much attention because it’s nothing more than a proxy fight over abortion. Rabid pro-lifers believe that their brethren should be able to violate any law to prevent individuals from having an abortion, or even birth control. Rabid pro-choicers, on the other hand, take no small measure of joy at the thought of pro-lifers being forced to assist in an abortion. I have no intention of wading into the thoroughly-muddied waters of the abortion debate, so I’ll use some hypothetical situations based upon the pharmacists’ argument.
What if Denny’s hired a Muslim cook and the cook refused to cook any pork products because it is strictly forbidden by the Quran? Perhaps Denny’s would try to work around the cook’s beliefs by allowing him or her to pass pork orders to another cook? Walgreen’s tried a similar tactic by allowing the pro-life pharmacists to pass morning after pill prescriptions to other pharmacists. There’s a problem with this compromise: What if the Muslim cook was the only cook working, and a customer ordered pigs in a blanket? Should the customer be forced to order another breakfast, or should Denny’s be permitted to fire the cook for refusing to do his or her job?
The answer, to me, seems pretty clear: While an employer should attempt to make reasonable accommodations for the religious beliefs of its employees, it’s unreasonable for an employee to expect his or her employer to lose customers because of his or her religious beliefs.
Any individual planning on becoming a pharmacist should surely know that at least once in their professional career, he or she will be asked to fulfill a prescription for birth control pills and possible even a morning after pill. If the prospective pharmacist knows that he or she will be unable to do so, he or she should reconsider careers – or own their own pharmacy. But it’s simply ludicrous to expect an employer to lose business to accommodate your religious beliefs.
Should a Hindu worker in a slaughterhouse expect to keep his or her job if he or she refuses to slaughter cows? Or to bring it back around to abortion, should a pro-life nurse who works at an abortion clinic receive a paycheck if he or she won’t assist the doctor perform an abortion?
Right or wrong, Walgreen’s has chosen to stock emergency contraception pills. Company policy and state law requires their pharmacists to dispense those pills. If the pharmacists can’t do so, the pharmacists need to find a different employer.
Maybe it has; there's about six inches of snow outside tonight, and I find myself in complete agreement with Pat Buchanan.
As you may know, GM's grand plan to revitalize the company includes laying off around 30,000 workers, closing plants, and paying their executives multimillion-dollar salaries. I live in town that will see two plant closings, and like many other residents, I'm sickened that workers, not shareholders or executives, have to pay the price to fix GM.
Apparently, so is Pat Buchanan. Check out these quotes: "SCARBOROUGH: Pat, if you are the CEO of GM and you see that you are losing money, that you're getting raked out there on the market, don't you have — if you are talking to Wall Street, if really talking to your people, don't you have to fire these people? Don't you have to cut back? Don't you have to become more conservative? Did they have any other choice?
BUCHANAN: Well, first, I don't call it conservative.
But you are exactly right. They sacrificed the workers for the benefit of the corporate guys and for benefit the shareholders. The global economy puts shareholders at war with workers. It puts guys like me at war economically with me with working folks. And, Joe, we shouldn't be. That's not the old Republican politics or economics."
It seems weird to read a Republican arguing against free trade, doesn't it? How about this: "SCARBOROUGH: Take a look at the money that is being made, Pat, by General Motors` top brass. With bonuses and salaries, CEO Richard Wagoner made $4.6 million last year. Chief financial officer John Devine pulled in almost $3 million, as did GM chairman Robert Lutz.
Now, Pat, I don't usually talking about salaries, but while you are firing 30,000 people Thanksgiving week, it's kind of hard to justify that type of money, isn't it?
BUCHANAN: Yes, Joe, it used to be that the top executives made 20 times what their workers do. It's now in the neighborhood of 400 times, the great big executives, what their workers do... Joe, something is wrong with the board of directors of these companies who are voting those kinds of salaries or tolerating that. And, frankly, that's not terribly high, given what some of them are making."
The rest of the transcript is great, too. Jim Cramer and Pat Buchanan agree that corporate interests are not in the best interests of the American worker. I wonder if American workers will ever start voting their interests instead of their perceived identities?
From Business Insurance: "PHILADELPHIA—Pennsylvania's Commonwealth Court ruled Tuesday that a 2002 tort reform measure that limited joint and several liability was unconstitutional.
The court ruled that the so-called Fair Share Act, which business groups favored because it required greater use of proportional liability in awarding damages, violated a state law that each bill should address a single-subject. The tort reform measure was added to a bill related to DNA testing of offenders, according to the court decision."
It's rare that errors like this benefit the little guy. I'm sure the legislature will make "fixing" this a top priority, but this still makes me chuckle. I'd like to think it worked out this way because some tricky legislators agreed to tack it onto the DNA bill, knowing that it would be declared unconstitutional. But that would require a degree of skill not often seen on the left side of the legislative aisle.
From Business Insurance: (Their news alerts are awesome.) In its decision Thursday in Matthew Ferdon vs. Wisconsin Patients Compensation Fund, a divided court ruled that the state's cap, currently $445,775, violated the equal protection guarantees of the state constitution.
While this eliminates the cap in only certain cases, it's a start. If anyone has a copy of the decision, please send it my way.
This article has made the rounds, but I wanted to comment on it: "RICHLAND, Wash. - A doctor in Washington state has dropped a patient because she refused to sign an initiative to limit malpractice awards."
I believe that people should have the right to decide who they do business with on just about any grounds. But I wonder where doctors like this will draw the line? Will they refuse to treat Democrats? Or Libertarians? Or Ralph Nader?
Personally, I wouldn't want to be treated by a physician who is that terrified of being sued for malpractice. Kind of sends the wrong message about his competence, doesn't it?
Business Insurance reports that a group of 7,000 doctors has turned to trial lawyers seven times in their quest to make insurers treat them fairly. "The lawsuits, which were filed by the 7,000-member Connecticut State Medical Society, alleged that the health plans violated the state’s unfair trade practices law by denying, reducing and delaying claims payments to doctors."
These doctors have it right: Insurers are the problem. Unfortunately, the doctors lost this suit, which was their seventh.
The cynic in me is forced to wonder if these doctors are considered "vexatious plaintiffs," filing "frivolous lawsuits." After all, they've lost four out of seven lawsuits so far. And, I'm also constrained to point out that doctors, like everyone else, have no problem hiring "greedy trial lawyers" when they have a problem.
Fox News published this story about how the FDA suppressed research that shows as many as 139,000 people may have had heart attacks caused by Vioxx, and as many as 55,000 may have died from them.
It's still up in the air as to how bad the Vioxx situation is, but it looks like the following facts will turn out to be true:
- At least one scientist at the FDA believed Vioxx was dangerous.
- At least one scientist at Merck believed the drug was dangerous.
- The powers-that-be at Merck and the FDA prevented the release of information about the dangers of Vioxx.
- Tens of thousands of people were injured or killed because the FDA didn't do its job properly.
I'll again remind everyone that under proposed tort reform, Merck couldn't be sued because the FDA approved Vioxx. Isn't this proof positive that it's a bad idea to give corporations a Get Out of Jail Free card if their product passed government safety standards?
And wouldn't it also be a good idea to reform the Federal regulatory agencies so they aren't so chummy with those they regulate?
I've often been critical of trial lawyers due to their general apathy about the tort reform scam. However, Trial Lawyers for Public Justice has given me hope. They've recently launched a new campaign to fight to keep the courthousefor those who need it.
I was very surprised - pleasantly - that they fight against class action lawsuits where the plaintiff's lawyer(s) get as much or more money than the plaintiff.
Check their site out.
I'm often critical of the media because of their poorly-researched and hastily-written "articles" that push for tort reform. But this one, from a Missouri newspaper, takes the cake. The headline includes the phrase "workermen's compensation." There's no such thing as "workermen's compensation." It also talks about capping "non-monetary" awards. Last I checked, all juries awarded was money.
The real point of the post isn't to make fun of poor editing, but to point out that the "Show Me" state is pushing for tort reform.
Here's a nice letter to the editor of the Baltimore City Paper: "...Texans amended their state constitution to place a cap on medical malpractice awards for pain and suffering. GE Medical Protective, the nation’s largest provider of medical malpractice insurance, has admitted in a filing that a $250,000 cap on damage awards for victims of malpractice will not lower physicians’ premiums.
According to the filing, in which the insurer requested a 19 percent hike for doctors’ insurance, “Non-economic damages are a small percentage of total losses paid. Capping non-economic damages will show loss savings of 1 percent,” which contradicts a March 2004 report in which GE Medical Protective stated that capping noneconomic damages is a “critical element (of reform) because in recent years we have seen non-economic damages spiraling out of control.”
Again, an insurance company - the largest malpractice insurer in the nation, purportedly - admits that tort reform won't save doctors any money.
Those who argue for tort reform sometimes claim that there's a tort tax that costs every American money. By their logic, we're also forced to pay a Lobbying Tax. "As President Bush campaigned for reelection pledging to protect doctors and insurance companies from patient lawsuits while easing the tax burden on businesses, industry groups spent record amounts of money lobbying to influence the White House, Congress and their constituents.
Special interests spent $1.1 billion during the first half of 2004 on lobbyists and advertising campaigns, according to public records that interest groups are required to file with the Senate.
Reports tallying lobbyist expenditures for the rest of the year are due in February — and industry insiders expect the yearly total to exceed last year's record of roughly $2 billion.
"A lot of business groups have been waiting for years, if not decades, for all the political stars to be aligned so they could get legislation passed on issues like medical malpractice," said Stephen Moore, who heads the Club for Growth, a leading business advocacy group."
Nice to know that big business is spending billions of dollars to buy legislation that will screw the average American.
It's all but certain Ohio is going to get new tort reform laws. And like most tort reform laws, this package was enacted due to fear: "...[T]he provision was important not because there were a lot of cases related to a problem, but because there was a concern that it may become a problem."
This a classic tort reform technique - create fear about a type of lawsuit that could become prevalent, and then rush to pass legislation to fix the "problem."
A recurring theme in the tort reform movement is that we need to pass laws to "protect" a certain class of defendants from being sued. However, as I explained here, nothing can ever stop people from filing frivolous lawsuits. This bill, for example, is supposed to protect farmers from being sued by people injured on their property. But the reality is that an injured person could still sue the farmer, in which case the farmer has two choices - pay for a lawyer to defend his case, or let the injured person win a default judgment against the farmer.
Tort reformers exploit the ignorance of the average citizen with respect to the law when they claim that tort reform will "protect" anyone from being sued. It won't because it can't.
Again, I'm not taking sides with Democrats - I'm still irritated at Kerry and Edwards' disingenuous and dishonest stance about tort reform. That said, here are some quotes from a great article.
For those of you who don't know, expert witness fees aren't reimbursed if a plaintiff wins a case. This quote sums up the problem with capping pain and suffering. "Ivy explained that the only money Smith could extract from Heritage would be for her mother’s “pain and suffering.” To that end, testimony could be introduced about the terror caused by the brutal rape of a confused, elderly woman. But even the most sympathetic jury couldn’t give her more than $250,000, the limit set in the constitutional amendment that passed the previous September. Then Ivy explained why even the maximum award, which Smith was unlikely to get, wouldn’t be enough. Tort reform would force Smith to hire experts in several fields, including psychiatry and nursing-home administration, to prove Heritage had been negligent, costing as much as $20,000 per witness. And with settlements rarer because insurance companies know a jury can’t sting them for more than $250,000, a trial was far more likely than before the initiative passed. All told, Frank Ivy’s five-person law firm had to be prepared to spend $100,000 with no guarantee of recovery or earning its contingent fee of 40 percent of the payout. When all the math was done, the best Smith could hope for would be to win perhaps $50,000 from a nursing home that apparently hired a sexual predator to care for her mother. "
I've previously read that malpractice kills 90-100k people per year, and is the sixth leading cause of death. This article claims it's 131k and the fourth leading cause of death. Considering the article's author - Dan Zegart, Google him - I believe it. "More specifically, malpractice filings declined nationally by about 4 percent between 1995 and 2000. And while a recent analysis of the Medicare population estimated that medical errors kill 131,000 people annually, making it the fourth leading cause of death, medical suits are only 5 percent of personal-injury filings, with product liability cases another 5 percent. Plaintiffs lose 60 percent of product cases and 70 percent of malpractice suits.
Not only are socially significant lawsuits like malpractice and product liability a small fraction of the legal picture but numerous studies show that capping damages doesn’t affect insuance premiums. One survey examined insurance rates between 1985 and 1998, then ranked the states according to the severity of their restrictions on lawsuits. Increased severity did not produce lower rates. In Texas, where malpractice filings dropped 20 percent in the nine years before Proposition 12, the liability picture has been little improved by its passage. About a third of doctors will see a decrease of 12 percent—after cumulative increases of 147 percent. The rest will either get no relief or double-digit increases."
I knew that the tobacco industry funded many "Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse" groups, and that it provided 50% of the funding for the American Tort Reform Association. But I didn't know that Karl Rove used to be a Philip Morris consultant: "The solution was born in south Texas in 1991, when the Rio Grande Valley Chamber of Commerce, infuriated by a $2.5 million verdict to two Mexican-Americans illegally fired from a sugar mill, launched Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse, which plastered billboards across the valley with slogans like “Lawsuit Abuse: Guess Who Picks Up the Tab? You Do,” according to a joint study by the Center for Justice and Democracy and Public Citizen. The cigarette companies were already deeply involved in the issue, and Philip Morris provided generous start-up funding for Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse. Thanks in large part to tobacco largesse, there were CALA groups all over the country by the mid-1990s. In 1993 and 1994, while a politically green George W. Bush received instruction from Mike Toomey, soon-to-be lobbyist for Texans for Lawsuit Reform, Karl Rove, a consultant to Philip Morris, was convincing Bush to exploit the lawsuit-abuse issue in his first gubernatorial campaign, according to the book Bush’s Brain, by James Moore and Wayne Slater. Tort reform proved a powerful weapon. Although of little interest to voters, the issue, according to Rove himself, was a magnet for corporate donations—among numerous other benefits. "
If it weren't for those "damned greedy lawyers," asbestos would still be in our schools. In some cases, Gordon Gecko had it right: Greed is good. "Carl Bogus, a law professor at Roger Williams University, argues that what plaintiff’s lawyers do best is regulate, a role that has become more and more vital as government’s watchdog function has shrunk under conservative attack. Bogus notes that while asbestos caused 170,000 deaths from lung cancer, the Environmental Protection Agency was never able to ban it. Lawsuits forced it from the market. "
It's always good to know that the 7, 8, and 9 digit salaries of insurance company executives is included in the "tort tax." "On the tort reform side, the numbers tell a story of squandered dollars. The $809 “tort tax” was invented by taking $233 billion, which is what insurance industry consultant Tillinghast-Towers Perrin says is the cost of the tort system, and dividing it by the population of the United States. But those billions represent not only legal expenses but the total cost of running the insurance industry, including executive salaries, advertising expenditures and much else unrelated to lawsuits. The real figure is probably less than half that amount. "
Read the rest of the article when you get a chance. It's lengthy but informative.
Continue reading "Another Interesting Article with an Anti-Republican Slant" »
The Denver Post reports that a switch from no-fault (and no lawsuit) auto insurance to a traditional at-fault (sue the at-fault driver) system is leading to "double-digit decreases" in insurance premiums.
As a result of the risk of being sued for bad driving habits, "Colorado drivers are safer and becoming more aware on the road." This is proof that the tort system works just fine.
The big question I have is why this switch to a tort-based system is referred to in this article as "tort reform."
As readers of this site know, I've never made attacks against either political party. That's because I don't feel that tort reform is a partisan issue. Therefore, I'm not going to say whether I agree or disagree with the anti-Republican stance of this interesting article. But I will point out these excerpts I found quite enlightening: "Corporations with revenues of $1 billion or more have an average of 86 lawsuits pending at any given time. Most of this litigation is employment/labor disputes, contract disputes and intellectual property cases. They hate it when the public gangs up on them, but they love suing each other and are quite aggressive. Citigroup has reserves of over $7 billion for litigation expense and that is just for defense; one wonders what their "offense" budget is."
"If damage awards beyond direct compensation for injury are limited to $250,000, consider this outcome when a victim "wins": 40% of the award is paid in taxes, leaving $150,000; and then your attorney gets 30% of $250,000, or $75,000, leaving the victim with $75,000 to, perhaps, apportion over the 60 or so remaining years of a severely handicapped child who was victimized by a medical error. Is this the kind of justice we must tolerate in order to preserve the system? "
Tort reformers often claim that some vexatious plaintiffs use the tort system as a form of extortion. The scam goes like this: A plaintiff with a legitimate - but frivolous - claim will sue a defendant hoping to force a settlement for more than the case is really worth.
Sadly, this really does happen. In fact, I know of one vexatious plaintiff who has done this to over 7,000 defendants. This plaintiff finds someone who has caused them a trivial amount of financial injury - $10 or so - sues them, and forces the defendant to settle for an average amount of $5,000. Yet tort reform would do nothing to stop these lawsuits. Why? Because they're filed by big business.
This article sums it up.
Fox News published this editorial arguing that the federal government has no business telling states how to run their courts. For example: "The national government is not empowered to dictate substantive rules of state tort law. And Republicans who are supposedly devoted to fighting federal bloat, should be on the front line in stopping the central government from worming its way into an area that has been left to the states for two-and-a-quarter centuries."
The guy goes off into lala-land when he suggests that consumers may eventually decide whether to buy their products based upon the tort laws in the states where product manufacturers are based. But Federalism is just another reason not to pass tort reform.
This news release at Public Citizen reveals:
- The people who most take advantage of the legal system are the business interests lobbying to curtail citizen’s legal rights: U.S. businesses file lawsuits four times more often than individuals, according to an analysis of states and counties that keep such data. Moreover, businesses are 69 percent more likely to be sanctioned by federal judges for filing frivolous lawsuits than are tort plaintiffs and their attorneys, according to an analysis of the 100 most recent cases where such sanctions were imposed.
- Tort lawsuit filings have decreased 9 percent overall from 1992 through 2001, according to a joint tracking project of the Conference of State Court Administrators, the Bureau of Justice Statistics and NationalCenter for State Courts. The filing data from 30 states represent a total of 74 percent of the U.S. population. When adjusted for population growth, tort filings declined by 15 percent, from 269 to 228 per 100,000 over that period.
As I've mentioned before, tort reform proposals never include caps on damages for financial injury cases, such as when one company steals the intellectual property of another. Financial injury verdicts are larger and more commonplace than personal injury verdicts, but since corporations are often the recipients of financial injury verdicts, they don't want them capped. Hypocritical?
One complaint about plaintiff's lawyers is that they file frivolous lawsuits against big corporations to try and make a few bucks by settling. Many people believe that this purported behavior is so bad that we need to reform the legal system.
So why is it OK when corporations behave the same way? Monster Cable has been filing shakedown suits against anyone who uses the word Monster in their business, such as:
The suits are supposedly brought because Monster Cable is afraid that consumers will think that Monster Cable is associated with anyone else who uses the word Monster in its business. I'm pretty sure that no one said, "Hey, Monster Cable just hired Pixar to make an awesome movie about Monsters. Let's go see it NOW!"
Maybe Monster Cable will sue me for telling the truth about their product: It's not worth the price premium over regular brands of cable. Here's an excerpt from a great article at Forbes about Monster Cable: TO ENCOURAGE audio salesmen to push its costly stereo cables, 12 times a year Monster Cable flies a dozen or so top producers from stores around the country to all-expenses-paid weekends at places like the Napa Valley, Hawaii and Germany.
Founder, chairman and sole owner Noel Lee even lets the star salespeople zoom around in his 13 sports cars, including a $200,000 Ferrari.
Lee needs good salespeople because his product requires lots and lots of selling. Buy a $400 stereo from the Good Guys in California and chances are you'll also walk out with $50 worth of Monster cables. Buy a $1,000 Marantz amplifier from Ken Crane's Home Entertainment in California and you'll get sold on a $100 connecting cable.
This reveals one of the great hypocrisies about tort reform: Business wants limits, caps, and restrictions on personal injury cases, where they're usually the defendants, but they want no limits, caps, or restrictions on financial injury cases, where they're often the plaintiffs.
My latest thought on the Monster Cable Lawsuits is here. Or go here and find out why what Monster Cable is doing would make a great episode of The Sopranos.
A friend of mine sent this link to a story at Fox News. Voters in Florida have approved a measure that will suspend a doctor's license if that doctor has three malpractice payouts. As interesting as this concept is, that's not what I want to discuss.
Instead, take a look at this quote: Yelverton is among the physicians caught in the middle of the fight.
Like thousands of other Florida doctors, he has never gotten in trouble for making a mistake. He has delivered more than 10,000 babies in his 33-year career -- enough, he notes, to make a "whole little town."
But the 63-year-old increasingly feels it was just not worth it to be a doctor in this state, and he now works in the front office of his practice to develop procedures to reduce the risk of medical mistakes.
One reason he stopped seeing patients and delivering babies was the increase of the cost of his malpractice insurance, and the feeling that at any time he could lose a bundle in a lawsuit, whether it had merit or not.
"The hardest thing about giving up a very successful practice of 33 years is that your patients have come to rely on you for what they consider quality medicine and they have to find someone else," Yelverton said. "And it's one less experienced doctor."
So, in 33 years, and through 10,000+ deliveries, this doctor had never had a malpractice payout - but malpractice insurance rates are driving him out of medicine. Will someone please explain to me doctors don't lobby for insurance rate caps instead of trying to cap malpractice payouts?
It's kind of sad, really. The United States Chamber of Commerce was founded by Edward Filene, (Of Filene's Department Stores fame) a great businessman who advocated minimum wage for women, paid leave for employees, and human rights in general. He eventually quit the Chamber because it became, in his opinion, a bastion of right-wing conservatism dedicated to corporate tax evasion.
Now the Chamber has focused its attention on trial lawyers:
The billionaire chairman of an insurance company describes members of the group as "terrorists." To the head of a national wholesalers group, they seem like "predators."
The US Chamber of Commerce is cosponsoring a $10 million advertising campaign to "educate voters about the devastating impact" these people are having on the American way of life.
The target of these attacks is not Al Qaeda or some new pestilence sweeping the nation. It's trial lawyers.
Seems to me like trial lawyers need to counterattack with a $20 million campaign.
Wasn't it only a few days ago I chastised trial lawyers for failing to put up a tough enough fight against tort reform, and warned that it could happen at a Federal level?
"House Republicans pushed through legislation Tuesday aimed at reducing frivolous lawsuits.
The bill passed, 229-174, sending it to an uncertain fate in the Senate."
Read the rest.
Many tort reformers want a "loser pays" system, meaning that if a plaintiff files a lawsuit and loses, the plaintiff has to pay the expenses of the defendant.
If we were going to implement that, shouldn't we also make the state reimburse criminal defendants that are acquitted, or have the charges dismissed?
And what about people like this guy, who are sent to prison for decades, and then exonerated? Shouldn't they receive compensation?
PORT ST. JOHN, Fla. - A man who was freed after serving 22 years for a rape he didn't commit walked out of jail with a few possessions in a plastic bag, and nothing else.
Wilton A. Dedge, 42, didn't get the $100 that Florida gives even its most vicious ex-cons when he was released last month. He didn't get the counseling or job referrals or temporary housing the state offers paroled murderers and rapists.
He didn't even get a bus ticket home.
The Detroit Free Press published this article explaining that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will no longer allow the public to access information pertaining to the safety of vehicles.
The worst-argument-of-the-day award goes to Rae Tyson, the chief spokesperson for the NHTSA. Tyson actually said: "If we let all of the information be made public, it would have a chilling effect on the data we get. If, for example, warranty data got out, manufacturers might quit offering warranties or quit handling problems via warranty."
Is Tyson really so stupid as to believe that if consumers knew how often new cars had problems repaired under warranty that auto manufacturers would react by either: (a) Quit offering warranties altogether, or (b) Stop honoring all of their existing warranties, thereby subjecting themselves to millions of lawsuits for breach of contract?
Thought this was a funny article.
"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A campaign worker for President Bush said on Thursday American workers unhappy with low-quality jobs should find new ones -- or pop a Prozac to make themselves feel better. "
CNN has a good article here about why doctors shouldn't be afraid of Edwards.
This quote about tort reform asks a very good question:
"Why should the most unfortunate -- the disabled, the suffering, the severely ill -- forego compensation? It seems mean-spirited to ask those who have lost the most to bear the brunt."
This article at Yahoo explains how some doctors want to be able to refuse treatment (except in case of emergency) to lawyers and their support staff. Here's an excerpt:
"The issue of doctors refusing to treat plaintiffs attorneys gained prominence last month when South Carolina doctor J. Chris Hawk, a delegate at the American Medical Association annual meeting in Chicago, proposed a resolution that -- except in emergencies -- would make it ethical to refuse care to plaintiffs attorneys and their spouses. The proposal died after being denounced by several AMA delegates during a heated debate. "
I wonder if the same doctors that support that resolution would consider hiring a plaintiff's lawyer if they were the victim of malpractice? Or if they were sued for divorce?
The animosity between doctors and lawyers, or rather from doctors to lawyers is uncalled for, unprofessional, and hurts everyone.
I read this article at Law.com that discusses how lawyers are considering outsourcing their support staff to overseas countries.
Here's my favorite quote from the article:
Short said the case for outsourcing is compelling. Given an estimated 30 percent to 60 percent cost savings in support tasks, he said, outsourcing could potentially free funds for firms to hire more lawyers.
But law firms might just as likely use the savings to increase partners' compensation. Though corporations can point to shareholder benefit or increased research and development spending in justifying outsourcing, law firms are vulnerable to charges that such moves are motivated only by greed.
What the article doesn't discuss is the fact that most of the law firms discussed in this article, are defense firms that bill their support staff at a fairly high hourly rate - upwards of $100 per hour, in some cases. So if I'm Acme Megacorp, and I hear that my law firm has outsourced their support staff, I'm going to expect to pay less for the support staff. If the law firms do cut the hourly billing rate, then the savings disappears, or is greatly reduced. And if the law firms don't cut the hourly rate, they may lose clients.
There's also ethical problems, too. Lawyers are supposed to closely supervise nonlawyer staff members that work on cases. With the distance and time differences, it's going to be pretty tough to supervise a staff member in India. It's not hard to imagine an unhappy client filing a suit for malpractice.
The real problem is that law firms, like too many other businesses, are focusing on saving money instead of making money.
When I read statistics like these at Business Week, I begin to wonder if the real reason that doctors can't afford malpractice insurance might be that the Insurance cartels are gouging doctors out of sheer greed:
"U.S. property/casualty insurers’ profits surged to $29.88 billion in 2003, which is an almost tenfold increase over the $3.05 billion the insurers collectively reported in 2002, according to the Insurance Services Office Inc. and the Property Casualty Insurers Assn. of America."
In spite of a tenfold increase in profit, the insurance industry is still crusading for tort reform to protect those poor doctors. Seems to me like those poor doctors need to be protected from the insurance industry. After all, insurance profits skyrocket in the same way that malpractice premiums have. Of course, there can't be any connection between the two, can there?
According to MSNBC, Bank of America is going to lay off 12,500 people over the next two years in order to save $1.6 billion.
Here's a scary quote:
"Bank of America has about $938 billion of assets, 5,700 banking offices in 29 states and Washington, D.C., and about 36 million customers."
$938 billion in assets? And they're only the 3rd largest bank!
To me, the real question is when is the financial sector going to start feeling the pain of outsourcing? The prevailing wisdom is that financial analysts and accountants can crunch numbers just as well in India as they can here, except cheaper. Oh, and with the time difference, they'll always have their work done and on the boss' desk by 9 am!
It's no secret that I'm not a numbers guy, and I'm the last guy in the world you'd want trying to solve complex equations. With that disclaimer, someone please explain to me where my math errors are in this article about outsourcing jobs to India, China, etc.
One claim that sounds exceedingly spurious to me is that by sending jobs overseas, we're actually creating more jobs in the U.S. Here's a quote:
"Savings from outsourcing allowed companies to create 90,000 new jobs in 2003, with more than one in 10 of them in Silicon Valley or elsewhere in California, researchers said. The report predicts that in 2008, outsourcing will create 317,000 jobs -- 34,000 in California"
OK, so in 4 years, we'll have created 317,000 jobs in the U.S. This next quote is what confuses me:
"Investment banker Goldman Sachs last year estimated "offshoring" accounted for 1 million of the 2.7 million manufacturing jobs lost since summer 2000."
OK, so we lose 1,000,000 jobs and create 317,000 jobs. I come up with a net loss of 683,000 jobs. Somehow, this is good for the economy?
It must be, because according to the article, 86% of companies surveyed plan to outsource positions overseas.
Reading articles like these really make me think about the story of the Emperor's New Clothes. Really, are we supposed to believe that shipping jobs overseas will create jobs here? My bet is that any jobs created will be filled by H1B immigrants.
Speaking of H1B visas, check out this story about a guy who's suing Sun Microsystems for laying him off but keeping all the younger, cheaper H1B workers. Interesting.
Yahoo reports about a proposed bill in Florida that would severely limit the right of lawyers to advertise. Let's take a look:
"After proposing that the Florida Legislature assume responsibility for writing court procedural rules, some lawmakers now want to take over another judicial branch function by setting dramatic new limits on lawyer advertising."
Why does the thought of politicians writing court rules scare the hell out of me? Seriously, it's frightening to think that politicians seriously want to run the court system in Florida. My memory is a little hazy when it comes to civics class, but don't we have three branches of the government to act as checks and balances? It would seem to me that the Florida legislature wants to limit the power of the judiciary. But, let's go further into the article.
"As part of a wide-ranging medical malpractice bill introduced Monday in the House Insurance Committee, Republican House Speaker Johnnie Byrd has inserted a provision calling for unprecedented limits on advertising by lawyers in the medical negligence area."
Doctors, yet again, are used as pawns in the political process. Tort reformers have realized the fact that the public, in general, loves doctors and hates lawyers. Therefore, tort reform measures are often sold to the public as a way to stop "greedy lawyers" from running doctors out of business. Of course, the doctors are purportedly run out of business because of spiraling insurance rates. Yet again, no one questions the insurance cartel. The article has more:
"The measure comes on the heels of the House Judiciary Committee unanimously approving a bill last week that would apply to all attorney advertising. Both bills contend that attorney advertising has "created a crisis in this state's judicial system," though the sponsors offer no empirical evidence for that controversial claim."
Who needs empirical evidence when your argument involves taking actions against lawyers? After all, look at what those damned lawyers have done to this country: They've brought civil rights lawsuits that let those pesky blacks into white schools. They've held corporations like Johns Manville accountable for knowingly killing people with asbestos. And those horrible lawyers even have the audacity to sue doctors when they amputate wrong body parts.
"The legislation passed by the House Judiciary Committee last week would make it illegal to advertise in "a manner that solicits legal business for a profit by urging a person to consider bringing legal action against another." It proposes a civil penalty of $1,000 for the initial offense and $2,000 for each subsequent offense."
I'm not sure if I even have words to express how ridiculous this is. I think that Andrew S. Berman, a partner at Young Berman Karpf & Gonzalez, came close when he said that the bill "would get laughed out of federal court." Considering that this bill wouldn't - as lawyers put it - "withstand constitutional scrutiny," why the push for it? The article explains that, too:
"The moves to limit lawyer advertising come as the Republican-dominated Legislature increasingly seeks to exercise control over the Florida Supreme Court and the state judiciary, whose rulings at times have incurred the wrath of Gov. Jeb Bush and legislative Republicans."
Jeb and his pals seem to think that the best way to run a government is to erase the system of checks and balances between the three branches of government, and instead have a hierarchy which puts the executive branch at the top with the legislative and judiciary branches of the government subservient to the whims of the executive branch. I'm sure Jeb's brother couldn't agree more.
Simmons' proposed statute reads that the Legislature "has determined" that legal advertising that incites a person to file suit "destroys the personal responsibility of individuals, fosters frivolous litigation, and demeans the judiciary and the practice of law."
Personal responsibility? Why don't doctors who commit malpractice take personal responsibility and pay up? Why don't corporations make their employees take personal responsibility and refuse to release defective products. Why don't legislators take personal responsibility and quit passing laws that protect wrongdoers and prevent the injured from seeking redress?
There are many groups who believe that tort reform isn't even about protecting big business, but it's about taking money away from trial lawyers, who are the largest contributors to the Democratic party. News stories like this make me wonder if that's not really the case.
I got another alert today from Ross, Dixon, & Bell regarding some legal news. Here's the excerpt:
ExxonMobil Corp. "was intentionally malicious" in connection with the 1989 Exxon
Valdez oil spill and must pay $6.75 billion in punitive damages, a federal district
court judge has concluded in Alaska. In re the Exxon Valdez, 2004 WL 170354, D.
Alaska (decided 1/28/04). Last year, the court awarded $4 billion in punitives
against ExxonMobil. The Ninth Circuit vacated the $4 billion award and remanded the
case to the trial court for reconsideration in light of the U.S. Supreme Court's
punitive damages analysis in State Farm v. Campbell. On remand, the district court
increased the punitive damage award from $4 billion to $4.5 billion plus $2.25
billion in interest (for a total of $6.75 billion), finding that ExxonMobil's
conduct "was many degrees of magnitude more egregious" than the plaintiff in the
State Farm litigation. ExxonMobil apparently will appeal the court's punitive
damages award.
It's not often that a case is remanded to a trial court and the verdict is increased. The State Farm v. Campbell case mentioned in the excerpt held that only in rare circumstances should punitive damages be more than a single digit multiple of compensatory damages. I disagree with Campbell, because single-digit multiples don't discourage multibillion-dollar corporations from engaging in conduct that nets them many millions of dollars in profit.
I'm curious as to just how badly ExxonMobil behaved to warrant such a large award of punitive damages.
My news letter from RDBLaw.com arrived in my inbox this morning, and carried this little tidbit:
Senate Bill Seeks To Abolish Tax Deduction For Punitive Damage Judgments
Corporations would be prohibited from deducting punitive damages award payments from their taxes under Senate tax bill - "The Jumpstart Our Business Strength Act, S.1637." Business Insurance reports that the bill includes tax incentives that business likes, but the provision abolishing deductions for punitive damages has generated considerable controversy within the business community. According to Business Insurance, policy experts and congressional observers believe that legislators ultimately may remove the punitive damages language because of the claimed adverse effect on businesses who have historically relied on the deduction.
Of course, since this is to "Jumpstart Our Business Strength", I'm sure they'll yank this out. But, I certainly think it would be a damned fine idea to disallow tax deductions on punitive damages.
What I found most disturbing was the last part of the last sentence: "businesses who have historically relied on the deduction." Isn't there a problem if a business relies upon this? My thinking here is that a more massive award of punitive damages against those businesses might actually get them to clean up their acts.
Sadly, this article doesn't surprise me. AOL is getting ready to ship jobs overseas, and media-darling Google is, too. Here's a disturbing excerpt:
Gartner predicted that one out of every 10 jobs at U.S. information technology companies will be shuttled abroad by the end of next year. IDC recently estimated that by 2007, 23 percent of all IT services jobs will be offshore, up from 5 percent this year. The figures refer to IT work done for U.S.-based companies.
Cost cutting is the most commonly cited reason for this practice. Hewlett-Packard has pegged the cost of a talented programmer in India at about $20,000 a year, well below the cost of a top U.S. tech worker. Companies also face facilities costs and the expense of managing offshore work, offsetting the impact on the bottom line. The total savings from hiring an IT service provider to perform foreign work may be as high as 40 percent to 50 percent, IDC analyst Ned May said.
Good to know that companies like AOL and HP will be laying off the workers that made them successful. I think Steve Case and Carly Fiorina should be replaced with CEO's in India who'll work for $20k a year.
I was running on a Precor at the gym a day or so ago, and they had on a news program that I suspect - due to the content - was a "fair and balanced" Fox News program.
On the show, they were discussing why the flu vaccine isn't available more widely. One of the men said that they only reason the flu vaccine isn't being made in large enough quantities is because the drug manufacturers are afraid of being sued, and we therefore need to eliminate their liability from injuries caused by the flu vaccine. Sadly, the man wasn't even smart enough to suggest that we "immunize" the manufacturers from lawsuits.
Anyway, liability has nothing to do with why more flu vaccines aren't being made. The big reason more vaccine isn't available is that it's a long, arduous, cumbersome process to manufacture the flu vaccine, and the vaccine has a very limited shelf life. Check out this article at Slate for more info.
Let's just assume for a moment that the lobbyist was correct, and manufacturers fear being sued. So what? Why should any manufacturer of any product be immune from liability if their product hurts or kills people? I could see giving limited immunity to recipients of vaccines that are donated by the pharmaceuticals, but as long as they want to make a buck, they should have the same liability of any other business in America.
Slate published this article about how pharmaceuticals hire bioethicists to help push their products. I don't 100% oppose this, as long as there truly are "no strings attached" to the money. However, the article concludes with this quote:
So the next time you meet a bioethicist, pay close attention; he may look like a bioethicist, but when you peel back his mask, you just might see the adman smiling back.
Advertising is an enormously important part of the corporate machine. It's always interesting to see how it's used in nontraditional ways.
This morning in the shower, I was planning on writing something about how I don't think that big corporations are inherently evil. I was going to write about how big corporations also have the power to use their wealth and power to do good. Then, I saw perhaps the perfect example: A shoe company that gave out nearly $200,000.00 in bonuses to its 200 employees for Christmas. One employee got $19,000.00 for working 19 years. Read about it here.
When profits are the only consideration, everyone suffers. SAS Pittsfield is to be commended for setting an example of how well corporations can behave.
I saw this article at Yahoo about IBM's plan to ship close to 5,000 "highly paid" computer programming jobs to India or China.
Here's the best part:
"Some workers are scheduled to be informed of the plan for their jobs by the end of January. After that they will be expected to train an overseas replacement worker in the U.S. for several weeks. The IBM workers marked for replacement have 60 days to find another job inside the company, likely to be a difficult task at a time when IBM is holding down hiring."
One of the major arguments of tort reformers is that big lawsuits injure big corporations, and those injuries cost Americans their jobs. Bullshit.
Corporations have one goal, and one goal only: To make money. If they can lay off their entire workforce and outsource it to India to save money, they'll do it. If they can cut corners on safety to fatten the bottom line, they'll do it. If they can get laws passed to prevent them from being held accountable for any of their actions, they'll not only do it, but then they'll go on to behave even more badly than they did before.
An even more telling part of the article is that IBM managers have concern that the jobs can't be done as well overseas. Translation: IBM doesn't care about getting the job done right, they care about getting it done cheap.
IBM will be taking $300+ million dollars out of the American economy and putting nearly 5,000 Americans out of work for no other reason than to save money. Not that they're hurting: IBM made around $30 billion in profit, and is sitting on roughly $6 billion in cash.
This is a message from John Kerry that sounds pretty good right about now:
"My friends we need a president who understands what's happening in our country. This president lives out a creed of greed for he and his friends. I'm tired of seeing chief executives permitted to take their millions or billions to Bermuda and leave the average American here at home stuck with the tax bill. You know what I call that? Unpatriotic.
.... And when I finish with that tax code, when we finish with that tax code there's not going to be one tax credit left for any company to encourage them to take jobs overseas and forget about the bill and the burden in America."
I've often mentioned that the guys at ConsumerWatchdog do some good work. They just e-mailed an article that was published in the San Diego Union Tribune. The complete article is here, but here are a couple of quotes that I think you may find interesting.
Between 2001 and 2003, for example, the nation's six largest HMOs increased their earnings and profitability while dramatically decreasing spending on medical care -- taking 20 cents of every premium dollar for their overhead and profit while traditional Medicare spends less
than two cents on overhead.
Hospitals get $26.6 billion, which is good news for HCA. This is the hospital chain run
by the family of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. Frist holds stock in and will receive
his inheritance from HCA, which is also the subject of the most massive fraud
settlement in U.S. medical history.
The new law was greased by campaign contributions from the big medical industries. Pharmaceutical manufacturers contributed an average of $28,504 to the 204
Republicans who supported the bill, but just $8,112 each to the 25 Republicans who
opposed it. HMOs gave the few Democrats who supported the bill an average of
$11,654.
Every day, it becomes more and more obvious that any mega corporation with disposable income can buy Congress.
Everyone has heard about the man who received $3 million for his three-day erection, right? This is just another example of frivolous lawsuits, right? Wrong.
The first sentence of the article is as follows: "A man who had to endure a three-day erection after penile surgery was awarded $3 million by a jury two years ago, but an appeals court ordered a Monmouth County judge to lower the award."
It's implied by the first sentence that the entire reason that the man got $3 million was because of a three-day erection. However, reading further in the article shows that his penis is disfigured, and that he cannot have sex.
Gentle slants by the media outlets help contribute to the public's perception that lawsuits - especially medical malpractice lawsuits - are out of control.
Many of you have no doubt seen this story at Yahoo about the lady who was trampled by shoppers at Wal-Mart who were trying to get a $29.00 DVD player.
I'm not going to make any arguments as to whether Wal-Mart has any liability for this trample, whether they could have forseen the trampling, or anything similar. However, I'm going to point out one part of the article:
"...Wal-Mart officials called later Friday to ask about her sister, and the store apologized and offered to put a DVD player on hold for her."
It's things like this that get big companies sued. Wal-Mart should have either given her the $29.00 DVD player and paid her medical bills, or simply stayed quiet. Offering to put the DVD player on hold is an insult, and the kind of insult that leads to litigation; many people sue not to get rich, but because arrogant corporate employees offended or insulted the person.
I added this link to the Journals and Newletters list on the right. The law firm of Ross, Dixon, & Bell has several newsletters they publish online that may be of interest to many of you. They include:
Environmental - "Summaries of important cases and other timely information about environmental and mass tort coverage litigation in federal and state courts throughout the nation. "
Directors & Officers Liability - "Noteworthy developments pertaining to all lines of directors & officers liability insurance, including commercial, non-profit, healthcare, fiduciary, and employment practices liability."
Transportation - "Recent decisions affecting the transportation industry and its insurers from throughout the country."
Bad Faith - "News and information about some of the most difficult and high stakes matters that insurer clients face -- "bad faith" litigation."
Antitrust - "Antitrust case analyses involving corporations and consumer classes in a wide variety of different industries."
These web newsletters are a great way to stay informed about recent developments in court cases across the country. The Antitrust newsletter has lots of good information about tobacco lawsuits. For some reason, it doesn't have any antitrust actions against insurance companies. I wonder why... Oh, that's right! The insurance industry has a federal exemption (The McCarran Ferguson Act) from antitrust law! That's why they can collude together to fix rates! That's why Progressive can tell you the rates of their competitors! That's why health insurance isn't affordable! And that's why there's no real competition among insurers!
I'm sure Ross, Dixon & Bell aren't the kind of lawyers who'll approve of this site, but I applaud them for taking the effort to maintain their newsletters, and for the Pro Bono work they did for NYC Firefighters.
Information is power, and even an occasional read of their newsletters would be a good way to stay informed.
SANTA MONICA, Calif., June 20 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Florida's largest medical malpractice insurer, FPIC, announced yesterday that it will not fulfill its promise to lower doctors' premiums if the Florida legislature enacts a liability cap. The retraction is more proof that liability limits will never lower premiums, and only insurance reform including a mandated rate rollback will reduce physicians' rates, said the California-based Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights (FTCR).
"Insurers didn't lower malpractice premiums when a damage cap was passed in California, and they aren't going to lower rates in Florida either," said FTCR consumer advocate Carmen Balber. "The insurance industry's bluff was called and exposed: Damage caps have nothing to do with how much doctors pay for insurance."
Two weeks ago, in an effort to boost Governor Bush's proposal to cap non-economic damage awards at $250,000, the Florida insurance industry vowed it would reduce malpractice premiums by 20 percent if a cap was passed by the legislature. However, as soon as the Florida Senate indicated a willingness to pass a cap on Wednesday, FPIC withdrew the offer.
"A malpractice cap will never reign in the real crisis: reckless business practices, the volatility of the insurance cycle, and insurer greed. Only insurance reform -- including rate regulation and a mandated rate rollback -- will lower doctors' premiums and stabilize the malpractice market in Florida," said Balber.
California passed the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act (MICRA) in 1975, which capped non-economic damages at $250,000. In the thirteen years after MICRA's passage, physicians' malpractice premiums increased 450 percent. Only after California voters passed Proposition 103, a ballot initiative which instituted rate regulation and required a 20 percent rollback in rates, did doctors see their insurance premiums drop.
California Insurer Says Caps Didn't Lower Risk
In documents released last week by FTCR, California's second largest medical malpractice insurer acknowledged that damage caps and other insurer-touted restrictions on patient rights in California failed to reduce malpractice premiums.
FTCR challenged a 15.6 percent rate increase request by SCPIE Indemnity under the rules of California's insurance reform law, Proposition 103. As part of the Department of Insurance rate hearing, SCPIE Assistant Vice President and Associate Actuary James Robertson testified that: "While MICRA was the legislature's attempt at remedying the medical malpractice crisis in California in 1975, it did not substantially reduce the relative risk of medical malpractice insurance in California."
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