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Just In Case You Needed Another Reason in Favor of Universal Health Care System

New Survey Finds Free Clinics Heavily Burdened

“Our nation’s 46 million uninsured often delay or forgo needed healthcare because the cost is prohibitive,” said study author Julie S. Darnell, PhD, MHSA, then of the University of Chicago and now with the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The mean cost for a doctor visit for uninsured patients is around $50, Darnell wrote.

Traditional sources of care, including public clinics and federal health centers, both charge fees and bill patients. “Aside from cost considerations, care is frequently difficult to find, especially for those with the least resources,” Darnell added. For many poor, uninsured, and underserved patients, the only sources of care are emergency rooms or free clinics.

At the time of the survey, 1,007 free clinics were known to be operating throughout 49 states and the District of Columbia (Alaska was the lone exception).

Limiting Liability Is Simply Not A Good Idea

Judge H. Lee Sarokin: Is the Limitation of Liability for Oil Spills the Poster Boy Against Tort Reform?

If BP’s liability for the oil spill is limited to $75 million, who pays for the damages over that amount? If some fisherman loses a business he has had for 50 years and BP has paid out a day or two of its earnings for damages — reached the cap — does the fisherman absorb the loss or does the government (the taxpayer) pay the difference? I expect that in reality, BP will be responsible for more than the $75 million in damage claims, but I have to wonder what Congress was thinking when it adopted the limitation of liability.

Frivolous lawsuits Are Not The Issue – Carelessness Is.

NYT: Doctors at Harlem Hospital Did

Nearly 4,000 tests for heart disease performed over the last three years at Harlem Hospital Center – more than half of all such tests performed – were never read by doctors charged with making a diagnosis, hospital officials acknowledged Tuesday.

The echocardiogram tests, a type of ultrasound used to evaluate heart muscle and valve functions, were ordered by doctors at the hospital. The tests were stored on a computer and basically forgotten, officials said.

The lapse occurred because the cardiology service at the hospital had developed a system by which technicians were given the responsibility to scan all tests and flag any that looked abnormal, so that they would be given priority when doctors read them.

It appears, officials said, that the tests that were not flagged were put aside and forgotten.

The city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation, which runs the public hospital system, including Harlem Hospital, and Columbia University, whose medical school supplies the cardiologists who work at Harlem Hospital Center, acknowledged the problem in a joint statement on Tuesday, after being asked about it by The New York Times.

“While the process the doctors followed may have alerted cardiologists to those echocardiograms that were most likely to be abnormal, the failure to read the echocardiograms in a timely manner is inexcusable and may have placed patients at risk,” Alan D. Aviles, hospitals corporation president, said in the statement.

It was unclear who developed the screening system, hospital officials said.

Goliath Does Not Need Any Help

Changes in Personal Injuries | Articles Directory – Submit Articles Free

If after David beat Goliath the government decreed that henceforth when people fight giants, they must do so with six-inch sling shots and pebbles instead of rocks, there would be a huge outcry of protest. However, the changes that are being imbedded in our legal system in the name of tort reform are attempting to do the same thing.

For Profit Health Insurance Not Compatible With Real Life

Why has no nation on Earth ever had a successful private, for-profit, universal health insurance system?

The auto-repair industry serves its customers profitably in a free market for several reasons that do not apply to the health care industry:

1. The cost of an auto repair rarely exceeds 50% of the cost of acquiring an equivalent vehicle and is usually less than 5% of that cost.

The patient cannot acquire another body. The cost of an illness may exceed the combined cost of a buying a home and raising a family of university graduates.

2. Garages stay in business by making good decisions and providing good service.

Health care providers stay in business (retain their medical license) by conforming to industry standards. The health care industry (as opposed to the health care INSURANCE industry) does not want customers. They do not have to attract customers. There is no point in advertising for customers. The doctor regrets that the patient needs his help. The patient regrets being a patient.

3. Auto repair is based upon commodities: widely available parts, repair manuals, tools, and mechanics. Costs are well known and prices are regulated by competition

Health care equipment is highly technical and very expensive. Doctors are mostly specialists, often researchers with few students. They sometimes build their own equipment. The customer’s life may depend upon finding the right doctor. If that doctor does not have a contract with the patient’s private insurance company, the claim will be denied. (http://www.creators.com/liberal/froma-harrop/free-market-death-panels.html)

4. All drivers can afford to drive – until they can’t. If too many drivers can’t afford to drive, some garages may suffer or fail. It’s tough on the ex-drivers and ex-garage owners, but that’s the free market.

Patients must be served whether they can afford to pay or not. If they cannot pay, the cost must be shifted to others.

Patient Safety Reform Better For Patients And Doctors

RAND Study – Patient Safety Also Benefits Doctors

That common sense conclusion is the recent finding from the RAND Corporation, a think tank and research center.

In a recent study, the group finds that when patient injuries were reduced in California hospitals there were fewer medical malpractice claims.

The cries for tort reform to limit a patients’ ability to bring an injury claim, frequently fail to look at the impact an improved patient safety picture can have on reducing malpractice claims against doctors.

The research group analyzed medical malpractice insurance records in California from 2001 to 2005. California was chosen because it initiated medical malpractice reform 35 years ago and any fallout would not be recent. It also has a large and diverse population.

Researchers studied medical malpractice claims – that is claims by patients who had received poor care such as contracting a hospital infection, having a surgical instrument left in them, and receiving the wrong medication, among other preventable adverse events.

Using the records from four of the largest medical malpractice insurers in the state, researchers analyzed 365,000 adverse safety events and 27,000 malpractice claims that followed.

Frivolous Defense

Tort Reform/Frivolous Defense

With the near omnipresent discussion about Tort Reform, one can’t help but begin to think that there are too many “frivolous lawsuits” being filed, and even won. Just about the only law suits the news reports on are the ones where someone got a ridiculous verdict for a tiny accident. Are these true? Maybe some of them. But, by and large, they are exaggerated or have missing facts that the news didn’t bother to include. Most people do not realize that there are methods in place to keep truly frivolous suits from being filed – and certainly from going to a jury and being won. But that’s another blog for another time.

What is not discussed very often is frivolous defenses. For example, when a doctor does an operation on the wrong leg and gets sued, then files a defense saying that somehow his treatment was not outside the standard of care. As if it could ever be reasonable to do surgery on the left leg when the order clearly states the right leg is the injured one. But this happens much more often than one might realize. And when it does, it costs everyone a lot of money. Because the doctor has filed a defense, the lawyers and parties for both sides must go through hours and hours of discovery, hire experts (often costing the injured plaintiff thousands of dollars) and prepare to go to trial only to have the doctor settle at the last minute when he should have offered the settlement before the Plaintiff even had to hire a lawyer.

But the media does not like to talk about this aspect of lawsuits. After all, Plaintiffs are the ones starting the suit. And no one likes overly litigious people. But our legal system is set up so that people can have some recourse when they are wronged. Money is the only thing an injured person can get to “make up for” the damage. Unfortunately, even the highest court in the world could not give someone a new leg. And it is regrettable when a plaintiff must spend years in litigation and thousands of dollars because of a frivolous defense.

Charity McKenzie

Irational Ideas!

Tort reform idea is in whose interests?

I have been reading that many who oppose the health care reform law do so because it takes power away from ordinary citizens and places decisions in the hands of government bureaucrats. Many of those people say that what is really needed is tort reform to stop large malpractice awards.

But advocating tort reform is saying that a jury of 12 ordinary people cannot be trusted to make a reasonable decision in a malpractice case, so government bureaucrats need to step in to correct them.

Let me get this straight. Government should not look over the shoulder of insurance companies (who have a vested interest in rates) but government should look over the shoulder of ordinary people (who have no vested interest in the outcome of a malpractice case)? Makes my head spin.

Rex Clemmensen

More Study Proving That Damage Cap Has No Effect On Insurance Premiums

SSRN-Damages Caps in Medical Malpractice Cases by Leonard Nelson, Michael Morrisey, Meredith Kilgore

This article reviews the empirical literature on the effects of damages caps and concludes that the better-designed studies show that damages caps reduce liability insurance premiums. The effects of damages caps on defensive medicine, physicians location decisions, and the cost of health care to consumers are less clear. The only study of whether consumers benefit from lower health insurance premiums as a result of damages caps found no impact. Some state courts have based decisions declaring damages caps legislation unconstitutional on the lack of evidence of their effectiveness, thereby ignoring the findings of conflicting research studies or discounting their relevance. Although courts should be cautious in rejecting empirical evidence that caps are effective, legislators should consider whether they benefit consumers enough to justify limiting tort recoveries for those most seriously injured by malpractice.

Hot Coffee – The Movie

Error

This video doesn’t exist

“Hot Coffee reveals what really happened to Stella Liebeck, the Albuquerque woman who spilled coffee on herself and sued McDonald’s, while exploring how and why the case garnered so much media attention, who funded the effort and to what end. After seeing this documentary film, you will decide who really profited from spilling hot coffee.”

More Hoax Busters!

Defensive Medicine Doesn’t Lead To Unnecessary Medical Treatment

For every injury or illness, there are a range of possible treatments. The (very crude) drawing below represents that range. At the left end of the scale is to “do nothing” and see if the injury gets better on its own. At the far right end of the scale is immediate surgery to try and correct the problem. The bracket in the middle represents treatment within the permissible standard of care for a hypothetical injury. For this hypothetical injury, it would be inappropriate to do nothing, and it would also be inappropriate to take the patient to surgery immediately. Medically appropriate treatments might include administering drugs, ordering an inexpensive diagnostic test, and ordering an expensive diagnostic test. Doctor Smith may be conservative with his treatment and decide to order an inexpensive diagnostic test, while Doctor Jones may be aggressive and order the administration of drugs and the expensive diagnostic test. While both doctors treated the same injury in different ways, neither doctor committed malpractice. More importantly, if Doctor Smith is afraid of being sued and orders the expensive test, we cannot say that his fear of being sued led him to order a medically unnecessary test. The worst we can say is that the tort system nudged the doctor towards being more cautious.

Myth Busters!

The Great Hoax: Tort Reform, Better Healthcare

Myth No. 1: Rising healthcare costs can be tied to malpractice claims

According to the most reliable of sources, the projected costs of healthcare spending in 2009 were approximately $2.5 trillion – with a T. Of that, even including the costs of insurance premiums – figures that other studies have conclusively shown to be inflated without being tied to actual claims experience – the amount assignable to malpractice litigation is a mere 2 percent of the total.

The claim of inflated expenses due to so called defensive medicine, tests designed to get at the root of a problem and ensure for the patient as accurate a diagnosis as possible, are immeasurable and cannot be properly brought into the discussion without resorting to wholesale speculation.

Myth No. 2: Madison County-Judicial Hellhole

Reality sometimes intrudes on fantasy, and this is one sure case. Contrary to the popularly held belief, the Courts of Madison County have been among the most hostile to malpractice Plaintiffs in the State of Illinois. Case filings are down dramatically, even while announcements of new arrivals of physicians, the opening of hospital wings and the expansion of oft times competing specialty services fill the newspapers.

Truth be told, with the current litigation climate and juror attitude, no place is more hospitable to the negligent hospital or the clumsy surgeon than the Courts found in Edwardsville.

Myth No. 3: Malpractice premiums can be related to claims filed

Doctors in the Metro East have been consistently abused by their own captive insurance carrier, the Illinois State Medical Insurance Exchange – (ISMIE). Rates were set without regulation, and were naturally raised without remorse. Rather than focus on the real culprit, the strawman of the “frivolous lawsuit” – truly a myth given the oppressive costs involved for any such case – was created to deflect attention.

Dear Doctor: Just Wash Your Hands!

How American Health Care Killed My Father

About a week after my father’s death, The New Yorker ran an article by Atul Gawande profiling the efforts of Dr. Peter Pronovost to reduce the incidence of fatal hospital-borne infections. Pronovost’s solution? A simple checklist of ICU protocols governing physician hand-washing and other basic sterilization procedures. Hospitals implementing Pronovost’s checklist had enjoyed almost instantaneous success, reducing hospital-infection rates by two-thirds within the first three months of its adoption. But many physicians rejected the checklist as an unnecessary and belittling bureaucratic intrusion, and many hospital executives were reluctant to push it on them. The story chronicled Pronovost’s travels around the country as he struggled to persuade hospitals to embrace his reform.

It was a heroic story, but to me, it was also deeply unsettling. How was it possible that Pronovost needed to beg hospitals to adopt an essentially cost-free idea that saved so many lives? Here’s an industry that loudly protests the high cost of liability insurance and the injustice of our tort system and yet needs extensive lobbying to embrace a simple technique to save up to 100,000 people.

Know Your U.S. Chamber

Is Taxpayer Money Being Funneled Through The Chamber Of Commerce To Kill Health Reform?

To preserve brand identity and maintain secrecy, many businesses use groups like the Chamber to launder money for political means. For instance, health insurance companies lied and told the public all last year that they were supportive of reform — while simultaneously funneling up to $20 million dollars for attack ads through the Chamber (the other $80 million spent on Chamber attack ads against health reform is still unaccounted for).

Although reform would benefit the business community at large by controlling insurance costs and improving worker health, the Chamber is taking a rigid, ideological approach. Indeed, the Chamber is known to have become increasingly partisan under the leadership of Tom Donohue; an analysis by the Wonk Room found that the Chamber’s board is dominated by Republican donors. The Chamber seeks to kill large progressive reforms in order to kill progressive policies in general. Chamber officials have even gone on record noting they hoped to block health reform as a tactical measure to kill clean energy reform, a priority of many Chamber member companies.

Malpractice Circus…

Column: GOP Circus

But maybe we shouldn’t be too harsh with the rich and their political lackeys. They may know sheiks have a private floor at the Kahler Hotel in Rochester, Minn., with a convenient passageway to the Mayo Clinic. Other sheiks find similar resources in London.

These probably are the same Republicans who believe they can control health care costs by a federal takeover of malpractice laws. Their dirty little secret is that tort reform already has been enacted in 38 states, and it isn’t controlling rising costs, anywhere, anyhow.

Colorado has had tort reform since 1988. And guess what? Increases in health care costs there over the last 22 years are among the nation’s highest.

Tort reform may lower physicians’ malpractice insurance premiums — and increase insurance company profits. But physicians do not usually lower their fees when their malpractice premiums go down.

But people seem happy with this Republican faux-solution, and they keep chanting it.

Proposed Healtcare Plans: A Side by Side Comparison

Still on the Table?

Forget The Government… It’s The Trial Lawyer To The Rescue

Toyota makes the case for U. S. lawsuit system

In a time of carping about our “litigious society,” it’s time to recognize once more that litigation over dangerous products and services can avert countless deaths and injuries.

The courts provide an early warning system, alerting regulators and news organizations to hazards that the public wouldn’t otherwise be aware of. The courts also command responses from manufacturers who might have been able to fend off regulators. More important, the civil justice system is often the catalyst that forces lasting solutions.

In six years of reviews, NHTSA never used its authority to subpoena records from Toyota. But while the company was still dancing around the regulators’ requests in December, lawyers for Alberto’s family grilled a key Toyota official for two days. Other court cases were producing details about the company’s manufacturing processes.

By this time, Toyota had issued limited recalls. The company would soon make public acknowledgments and expand recalls. But while Toyota was focusing on the floor mats and “sticky” accelerator pedals, plaintiffs’ advocates and their experts raised the wider and more dangerous possibility of problems in the electronic system controlling the throttle in many Toyota models.

We have seen this pattern before. We no longer have the deadly Chevrolet Corvair or the exploding Ford Pinto, and we have a safer auto industry overall, largely because discoveries made in the courts prompted overhauls in regulation and oversight.

Tort Reform Is Anti-Victim/Consumer

Tort Reform Caps Result in Double Tragedy

The award sounds pretty significant at first glance; $1.3 million for the death of a daughter and mother. Would any of us give our lives or the lives of our parents for that amount of money? But, it gets worse. In Texas, where the verdict was rendered, there are limitations on the amount of money a jury or judge can award for mental anguish, pain & suffering in medical malpractice cases. The award will be limited to $250,000 per defendant. Tort reform strikes again, and this time it punishes two young children and their grandmother who must raise them.

Know The Facts

Time for Tort Reform?

To summarize first here are the initial facts as newspapers printed the story. An elderly woman was given a hot cup of coffee that dropped into her lap. She claimed she had been injured by the hot coffee and was given an award by a jury that totaled in the millions. The media intimated the award was outrageous for just spilt coffee, than had talking heads continue the story by making fun of the victim as well. But there’s far more to the story than that.

It turns out the coffee was scalding hot, beyond that of the ordinary hot cup of coffee. The coffee poured into the woman’s lap, and as a result of severe burns, she was unale to walk and had to use a wheelchair for mobility. She had severe pain as well. According to the details spelled out in the case in legal archives, Stella Liebeck, age 79 at the time, was severely burned as a result of the hot coffee spill. She wasn’t dirving at the time, just attempting to remove the plastic lid from the cup. Her sweatpants absorbed the coffee, holding most of the scalding coffee close to the skin. An examination by a vascular surgeon determined Liebeck had full thickness, or third-degree burns, over 6% of her body. She was hospitalized for eight days for treatment, including skin grafting.

Liebeck asked McDonalds to pay her medical bills, attempting to settle her claim for $20,000. McDonalds refused, citing other cases of people who had been burned by the coffee. In other words, they knew the coffee was too hot, but used this knowledge as part of a defense, that folks recover; and it isn’t so bad. McDonalds had said their coffee was at 185 degrees, and people wanted it like that.

The case was appealed, and as a result took some time to resolve. The initial jury award was $200,000 in compensatory damages, reduced by 20% because Liebeck was found 20% responsible for what happened. The jury also gave an award of $2.7 million in punitive damages. That amount equals two days of McDonalds’ coffee sales, according to calculations of coffee sales by this large fast-food restaurant chain. A trial court eventually reduced punitive damages to $480,000, which was three times the compensatory damages given at the time of the first jury trial. This followed the judge calling McDonald’s conduct “reckless, callous and willful.”

What many people don’t know, or fail to understand, is that plaintiff attorneys don’t usually win their cases nor are most of those cases frivolous.

A Mortgage Is Not A Moral Contract

Let me repeat. A Mortgage is not a moral contract. It is a legal document between two parties spelling out obligations between them. There is nothing moral in this nor moral and morality has any room to wiggle its way in this agreement. If, during the course of the existence of this document, it turns out that it makes more economic sense for one party to breach the contract, then breach it. If it makes more sense to just walk away from a home you are struggling to pay mortgage on and the mortgage is for more than the house is worth, consider walking away. No Moral dilemma here. This is simply an economic/legal consideration.

Home Underwater? Walk Away from Geithner’s Perverse ‘Homeowner Relief’ Plan

The homeowner relief plan adopted by President Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has not been working for a full year now. What’s worse, as the program is currently structured, its chief benefits accrue directly to the nation’s largest banks, leaving troubled borrowers to twist in the wind. But despite the administration’s indifference, underwater borrowers can still take matters into their own hands. If you owe more than your house is worth, just walk away.

The Whole Truth About Medical Malpractice And Insurance

ITLA released a white paper entitled “The Whole Truth About Medical Malpractice and Insurance.” (Click on the link for a copy of the paper.) The paper examines and refutes the propaganda being spread by those seeking to destroy the tort system in Illinois.

98,000 People Die Each Year From Preventable Medical Errors.

Medical Error Leads to Congressman Murtha’s Death

While various news outlets have described the death of Congressman John Murtha’s (D-PA) as resulting from “complications following gallbladder surgery,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is reporting that the “complications” involved an error by Murtha’s surgeons.

Illinois Supreme Court Finds Caps on Damages To Be Unconstitutional

Much to the delight of all victims of medical malpractice and consumers in Illinois in general, the Supreme Court found that caps on non-economic damages as legislated by Illinois lawmakers was an unconstitutional interference of the legislative branch with the judicial branch of the government. This is a great victory for all victims of medical malpractice in Illinois. regrettably, the fight does not stop here and will now be focused, at least for us, to the Federal arena where Tort Reform is still a threat to all consumers and victims of malpractice.

Illinois Supreme Court to rule on medical malpractice cap

The Illinois Supreme Court struck down the state’s medical malpractice law today, saying it violates separation of powers by allowing lawmakers to interfere with a judge’s ability to reduce verdicts.

The much-anticipated ruling, which challenged the constitutionality of damage caps for doctors and hospitals, is being watched closely by the health care industry and employers that see caps on damages as a way to tame rising health care costs.

The ruling could figure in the national health care debate of stalled health care legislation. In the U.S. Senate where Republicans have opposed existing health care reform legislation, the GOP has been vocal about the need for tort reform and caps on damages.

Tort Costs Are Greatly Exagerated

Americans for Insurance Reform

NEW YORK – A major new analysis released today by Americans for Insurance Reform (AIR) finds that a recent claim by the insurance consulting firm Towers Perrin (now called Towers Watson) that the U.S. tort system costs $254.7 billion is highly exaggerated and misleading, based on unverifiable and flawed work, and is completely inappropriate for evaluating the U.S. tort system. Even with all of its flaws and padded numbers, the Towers Perrin report, 2009 Update on U.S. Tort Cost Trends, still finds that tort system costs are growing slower than medical inflation, that medical malpractice trends are completely stable, that the U.S. tort cost environment is “relatively benign,” and that costs are less today, compared to GDP, than they were in 1983.

AIR’s critique, Towers Perrin: “Grade F” For Fantastically Inflated “Tort Cost” Report, is co-written by actuary J. Robert Hunter, Director of Insurance for the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), former Commissioner of Insurance for the State of Texas, and former Federal Insurance Administrator under Presidents Carter and Ford; and by Joanne Doroshow, Executive Director of the Center for Justice & Democracy.

Co-author J. Robert Hunter said, “It is really past time for Towers to stop publishing such flawed data year after year. The fact that they persist despite criticism after criticism shows a deep distain for fair and accurate presentation of facts.”

Joanne Doroshow said, “Even with all of its faults, which are extensive, the Towers Perrin report gives no credence whatsoever to any notion that tort costs are out of line, particularly medical malpractice costs. Policymakers and opinion leaders should be extremely wary of how this document is used, because it is routinely presented in a misleading manner by corporate lobbyists who seek to weaken the tort system and limit consumers’ legal rights against corporate wrongdoing, so-called ‘tort reform.’ Fear-mongering is typical, for example, as taxpayers are often misled to believe they are paying these inflated costs in the form of a ‘tort tax’ or ‘litigation tax.’ Yet the Towers Perrin report provides absolutely no support for such a contention, nor for the insurance industry’s ‘tort reform’ agenda.”

Tort Reform Gives Bad Doctors a License To Kill.

License to kill | kill, license

Tort law defines what a legal injury is and establishes liability. All tort reform limits the circumstances under which injured people may sue and limits how much a jury may award the injured.

Is tort reform good or bad? That depends on who benefits and who loses out. It benefits the insurance companies in a big way. It benefits for-profit hospitals and clinics. It hasn’t reduced our medical bills.

The big loser is the patient who is injured or killed by bad medical practice. Tort reform makes Florida’s health care system less safe and effective. It limits victims’ access to the courts and costs taxpayers money in order to care for injured victims. If you’re injured by bad medical practice, you will have a near-impossible time finding a lawyer who will represent you because of the 2004 Florida tort reform. It effectively gives bad doctors a license to kill.

Three Points To Remember

The agenda presented by the pro-Insurance Industry comprises of three main points that are presented to the public as the magic bullets which will save the health care industry and help the consumer. The three points are: tort reform, cross border insurance, and tax credits. None of these are designed to help us–the tax payer consumers.

McCain’s Health Care Solution Saves Insurance Companies Big Money, People Still Die.

Tort reform

lowers doctors insurance bills, lowers pay outs by insurance companies, but not insurance premiums for people. The CBO and independent research has found tort issues are unfounded. Tort reform penalizes victims, and doesn’t do anything about the 98,000 people who die in hospitals each year as a result of preventable medical errors, costing the health care system $29 billion in excess costs. The dirty secret: Much of what can be identified as “defensive medicine” is motivated not by liability concerns but by the desire to generate more income.

Allowing residents to buy health insurance across state lines:It removes basic state mandated coverage, services states have found to be life saving and humane. Secondly, cheaper a-la-cart plans puts the patient at risk by excluding too many basic services, putting limits on treatments, even after paying monthly premiums, and hides those exclusions in small print legalise designed to be ambiguous in court challenges.

Granting tax credits for people who purchase health insurance on their own. The tax credits aren’t indexed for inflation, are only a small part (a third or quarter) of the total premium and still “spreads the wealth” using other peoples money to pay for health insurance.

You Save Lives… AIG Limits your Healthcare!!

Isn’t this precious? These people are in a airplane crash–the plane crash landed in the Hudson River–and AIG is playing hardball in paying their claims. Insurance companies have generally adopted the triple “D’ approach to claims: Deny, Delay and Defend. Do not be intimidated by this tactic–it quickly falls apart when legitimate claims are brought before juries.

Nice job, Capt. Sullenberger. Now quit whining about that neck pain and get back to work!

In yet another P.R. coup for everyone’s favorite bailed-out insurance company, AIG balks at paying claims to passengers from the US Airways flight that miraculously landed in New York’s Hudson River last January. According to The New York Times, the firm tells passengers with medical bills to file claims with their own health insurers — assuming they have health insurance — and limits the number of therapy sessions for passengers traumatized by their brush with death to three.

Stop Blaming The Trial Lawyers… We Are On Your Side.

Call for tort reform obscures the real issue» Evansville Courier & Press

I am tired of scapegoating lawyers in general, and trial lawyers in particular, and it is one reason why I now call myself a Reagan conservative rather than a Republican.

Health care now absorbs almost 20 percent of our gross domestic product, which creates a hidden and growing tax on the American consumer. However, the best that the Republican Party and other conservative groups can do is to promote tort reform as its principal response to the health care dilemma.

On the one hand, conservative groups bemoan national solutions to state, economic or business problems, and yet do not comprehend that national legislation to control state courts is anathema to the Constitution. It violates the Constitutional principle that rights not granted to the federal government have been reserved to the states, and it undermines the concept of federalism.

So-called “tort reform” will usurp the legal rights of citizens when access to the courts provides the only means of redress against a large and malevolent federal government and powerful business interests.

Tort Reform And Its Questionable Success

Tort Reform: Questionable Success and Obvious Shortcomings

How are patients limited by tort reform?

The core of many tort reform bills is the limitation of non-economic damages. This includes compensation for pain and suffering. What happens when a malpractice victim faces no immediate economic damages? For example, what of elderly and young victims who are not employed? What of grieving families who face life without a loved one?

Charles and Shirley Ethier’s son was admitted to a San Francisco emergency room with a head laceration after being struck in the head with a surfboard. Despite the possibility of a serious head injury, the doctor who treated him failed to order a CT scan or even palpate the wound. Instead, the physician simply stitched him up and sent him home.

He wasn’t there for long. The Ethiers’ son had fractured his skull, and was suffering from extensive cerebral hemorrhaging. The sustained pressure on his brain eventually rendered him brain dead and he later died.

The jury quickly found for the Ethiers and awarded them $3 million in wrongful death damages — which the judge was forced to immediately reduce to $250,000, the amount allowed under MICRA for non-economic damages.

Tort Reform Fiction

Looking around for Tort Reform articles, I came across this bog entry which rather simply sums up what the Tort Reform proponents wants us, the Public, to believe. Always remember that ultimately, it is the Juries who decide the amount of the damages an injured person should receive–No one else makes that initial decision.

Tort Deform, Broken Down

I found this to be an excellent, simple break down of the position taken by Republicans and others who support tort deform:

“Let’s look at how a tort trial typically works. The injured party has a lawyer (you know, the “bad guy”). The doctor/corporation/defendant has a lawyer (or lawyers). There is a judge. And then there are twelve (sometimes six) ordinary citizens. – the jury.

The injured party’s lawyer has a chance to tell his client’s story. The lawyer(s) for the doctor/corporation/defendant has a chance to tell his(their) client’s side of the story.

The judge tells the jury what the rules they have to apply to the case are.

Then the jury makes a decision.

It is this last group of people the Republicans are really complaining about. They are the ones deciding whether to award money to the person who claims s/he was injured.
But to hear the Republicans tell the story, you would think that there is only one lawyer in the courtroom (the injured person’s lawyer), the judge is asleep, and the injured persons’s lawyer is sitting with the jurors as they deliberate, telling them what to do.”

Runaway Juries? Think Again!!!

And the biggest judgment awarded in 2009 went to…

The largest verdict awarded to a corporation last year was more than five times the size of the year’s largest product-liability verdict: a $300 million award against Philip Morris in a case involving a former smoker who developed cancer. The victim was awarded $56 million, with another $244 million in punitive damages.

So far there have been no reports of a call for a cap on jury awards in patent-infringement cases. Apparently juries are considered competent enough to register proper judgments in those disputes.

US Chamber of Commerce Is At It Again.

the US Chamber of Commerce has consistently engaged in disseminating false information to the masses. At some point they should stop doing that.

U.S. Chamber: More Lawsuit Malarkey

A spokesman for the Chamber, Mark Szymanski, told us the ad began airing “nationally” in late December and will continue to air until the end of January. But he would not disclose the amount of money the Chamber Institute for Legal Reform is spending on the ad.

Szymanski said the source for the ad’s claim is an October 2005 study, “Impact of Litigation on Small Businesses,” conducted for the Small Business Administration by Klemm Analysis Group Inc. of Washington, D.C. But that report says nothing of the sort. In fact, it found that less than 15 percent of federal lawsuits target any business entity at all, and that roughly half of those, or fewer, involved small businesses.

This is not the first time we’ve caught the Chamber making an inflated claim about the impact of lawsuits.

Tort Reform Is Not A Cure

The Cure Or The Poison Pill For Health Care?

Perhaps I am the only doctor in America that does not want to see tort reform happen. This time, the lawyers are correct. We should not be tampering with the public’s constitutional rights. It simply fails to solve the problem. It will not encourage or require doctors to practice better medicine.

A Great Analogy

Surfing the net I came across this great analogy describing the so called Tort Reform. This is exactly it–the attempt to prevent the little person, the regular folk, the You and I people to bring their grievance into a court of law and have other little people, other regular folks hear the evidence from both sides and render a judgment. And this only and only and only for the protection of the profits taken in by the Insurance Industry and nothing else.

Changes in Personal Injuries | Niche Volumes

If after David beat Goliath the government decreed that henceforth when people fight giants, they must do so with six-inch sling shots and pebbles instead of rocks, there would be a huge outcry of protest. However, the changes that are being imbedded in our legal system in the name of tort reform are attempting to do the same thing.