You do realize that even the Adminstration admits that private accounts don’t help the short fall, right? And you do know that the plan is that you don’t make 3% over inflation you lose money, right? And that the best known plan right now is to change what benefits are indexed to, which if done in the past would have meant a 40% cut in benefits, right?
It looks like there will be a very limited set of investment options. So what is this choice thing? And why don’t they invest the current surplus in an equally safe index fund? I’ll tell you why - it would make the deficit Bush is running up harder to finance.
The first commandment of investing is diversification. The fact that more and more people have 401Ks (those who choose to, that is) means it is all the more important to have a backup defined benefits plan.
So, no one is planning for retirement today? By the way, the system isn’t going bankrupt. In the worst case I think it could pay out 75% of today’s benefits even when the trust fund runs out. It was in much worse shape when the Greenspan commission fixed it. A fairly simple combination of raising the retirement age and raising the ceiling on contributions will fix it just fine.
BTW, to those who echo the Bushit that SS is a Ponzi scheme - show me a Ponzi scheme that has lasted 60 years and supports the retirement of millions of people. It is an utter lie.
Well, first of all, your first post in this thread, on the first page, said:
As far as i can tell from looking at the White House summary of Bush’s reform plan, the only aspect of damages that will remain unlimited is compensation for economic loss.
It is specifically non-economic damages, including punitive damages, that Bush is seeking to limit:
So, if my reading of this is correct (let me know if you think it isn’t), this basically means that, while economic damages will be unlimited—so that everyone can be fully compensated for their medical expenses, lost income, and other economic losses resulting from someone else’s negligence—the non-economic damages for such injuries will be capped at $250,000.
For me, the problem with such a system is that it fails to take into account the non-economic consequences of certain particularly egregious instances of malpractice. Someone earlier referred to losing a leg. If we take that as a hypothetical example, it seems to me that, even after all your hospital bills are paid, and you are compensated for lost income and other expenses caused by the error (all of which come under economic damages), you will still have such a reduced quality of life that it needs to be compensated further.
Of course, some people argue that, because these quality of life issues are subjective and can’t really be measured in economic terms, that it’s pointless handing out large amounts of financial compensation. But this ignores the fact that, like it or not, economic resources can help to compensate somewhat for the loss of quality of life brought on by something like losing a leg. Money allows you to do things that you can’t do without it; it allows you, in a case like this, to at least partially retrieve some of the pleasure lost in the loss of a limb. And the fact remains that wealthy people already have the resources to do this, while poor people do not.
If you think $250,000 is enough, ask yourself this question: if i offered to pay all your hospital bills and other medical expenses, and if i offered to compensate you for any lost earnings and other expenses incurred, would you allow me to cut off one of your legs for $250,000?
Look, i tend to agree that something needs to be done about some of the massive and, in my opinion, silly payouts that our legal system produces from time to time. But the fact is that such payouts are a very small minority of all cases. I mean, we hear about the big cases, but even Lou Dobbs, who’s an advocate for tort reform, points out that:
Suddenly, the problem doesn’t seem as big as some people are making it.
Furthermore, i think you actually missed the point of Evil Captor’s oroginal argument. If i read him correctly, his main point wasn’t really to make a distinction between wealthy victims of malpractice and the poor victims of malpractice. It was to make a distinction between the poor victims of malpractice and the wealthier doctors, hospitals, HMOs and large corporations that have been lobbying for tort reform. The proposed reforms will not only reduce payouts, but will, concomitantly, reduce penalties for those who cause the problems.
One of the reasons i oppose the current system is not because it limits the size of payouts to victims. For a vast majority of cases, i tend to agree that payment of all economic damages, and a cap of $250,00 is probably plenty. The problem, for me, is that Bush’s system for “reform” comes with no effective means for increasing the policing of and penalties for negligent and malfeasant practitioners, corporations, etc. If, along with his tort reform plan, he was willing to institute greater oversight of the perpetrators of various bad deeds, and punish them more severely for their greed or their negligence, then i’d be much happier with the package.
Because the whole system is not just about compensating the victim, although that should be a key consideration; the system should also be about discouraging and punishing negligence and criminal activities.
Also, many of those pushing hardest for tort reform only want it to apply to some types of civil suits and not others. For example, many of the most ridiculous and needless civil lawsuits occur between corporations, suing one another for various real and perceived slights and injuries. These lawsuits, like any other, constitute a drain on resources, but no-one really wants them to go away.
Also, as this page shows, some of the strongest advocates of tort reform have been, over the years, perfectly happy to launch the types of lawsuits they now decry as frivolous and wasteful.
It was following up on the lucky break that did it. Remember, one of those in the hijacking plot was captured and in custody on 9/11. They may not have been able to stop it true, but I would have given them a lot more credit if they made an effort, not dismissing operatives in the US as being unimportant.
But your second point is right on. I was listening to a George Carlin album made before 9/11, and he called what was going to happen exactly. He basically said what was the point of screening when you let people carry knives on the plane. I think we’d be better off if we made him Director of Homeland Security.
mhendo, I don’t really disagree all that much with what you say in the first 2/3 of your post, but it’s irrelevant - the point isn’t whether a cap is the right thing to do or not, but whether it unfairly disadvantages the poor. EC is using it as a data point in his woeful attempt to paint the country in half, and isn’t doing a great job of it. As such, there’s only really any point in my responding to:
Well, I think this about covers it - the only way in which you can include the tort reform in part of some alleged class warfare is by looking only at the poor victims of malpractice, and pretending that only rich people are affected by spiralling medical insurance costs. The reality is that both rich and poor people can suffer malpractice and claim damages, and that the costs of insurance are borne by not merely the doctors, but those who pay for their services. Unnecessarily increasing the cost of medical services can hardly be beneficial to the poor.
Regarding the reading of the White House statement, I think it’s a bit ambiguous - the first time through I parsed it as separating “non-economic” and “punitive”, but I can see how it can be read as lumping them together. Either way, the bill currently in Congress doesn’t deal with punitive damages as far as I am aware, and every news story I can find refers exclusively to pain and suffering damages being capped.
Finally, regarding your cite for the median jury compensation award, another way of looking at this is that the cap won’t affect many awards - merely the stratospheric ones. Reduce the mean award (and thus the insurance burden) without adversely affecting the majority of damages recipients? Sounds pretty reasonable to me.
But, while both malpractice and spiralling health costs might affect everyone, they affect the poor and middle-income earners disproportionately. This is both because the those groups are less able to bear the financial burden, and are more likely to have to give up necessities in order to meet the rising costs of health care, and because they make up a much larger percentage of the population than the wealth . As i said earlier, nominal equality does necessarily lead to similar effects for all people.
And you’re correct that both rich and poor pay for growing insurance costs. But this is where you ignore the punitive part of my argument. Because another way to reduce spiralling health costs over the long run is to make sure that doctors who are neglilgent or commit malpractice are no longer allowed to practice medicine. If we can weed out the bad doctors (and bad corporations, etc.), then the number of claims should decline, and health care costs along with them. The system as it stands reduces the possible claims by the victims without, as far as i can tell, implementing any new measures for punishing the offenders. Where, in this plan, is the incentive for bad practitioners to shape up?
Finally, just out of interest, if this plan goes through and malpractice payouts decrease significantly, do you think the American people will see the benefit in reduced health-care costs? Do you think health insurance premiums will drop? And if those things don’t happen, who then will be the greatest beneficiaries of the scheme?
Except they aren’t. We may not know exactly where the cap on them is, but they are capped by the Constitution. See BMW v Gore and State Farm v Campbell if you want.
They are also incredibly rare, though you wouldn’t believe that if you read only the material put out by the tort deform brigade.
The incentive is that one can still be sued for economic damages, $250,000 in non-economic damages, and (apparently) punitive damages with an unknown but constitutionally implied limit. You can’t argue that malpractice will carry no consequences after this bill passes - the point of it is to redress the balance.
Furthermore, the pain and suffering cap is only part of the wider reform, a lot of which is aimed at preventing “forum-shopping”, whereby trial lawyers find the most favourable jurisdictions in which to launch their class-action suits. Another aim is to tie the lawyers’ fees more directly to their cases’ success, in order to prevent some of the more frivolous suits. Maybe Evil Captor exempts lawyers from his classification of the naughtily rich, I don’t know. It’s hard to see how these measures could constitute an attack on the huddled masses, however.
Yes, I do think if the reforms result in a substantially decreased burden of liability, then medical insurance premiums will drop. If this were not to happen, it would require doctors across the nation to collaborate in deliberately paying more for their insurance than they need to. It’s not a scenario I find particularly likely.
I’m happy to take your word for it, and stand corrected - consider my statement changed to “punitive damages remain at their previous, somewhat vaguely capped status.” However, unless EC is extending his accusations of class warfare all the way back to the Founding Fathers (or believes that Bush wrote the Constitution), it’s difficult to see how this fits in with his little rant.
Well no, since the forum-shopping trend simply moves to another jurisdiction. While there still exist jurisdictions in which highly favourable verdicts are obtainable, insurance premiums will remain at the same level. Hence the suggestion of a nationally adopted cap. Also, that study has a lot of flowery language about how clever the authors are, and lots of nice quotes from no doubt hugely important luminaries, but its classification system is quite frankly fucked. There are states in their appendices whose measured liability nearly doubled over the studied period, yet they are ranked as having had “severe” tort reform, while some states whose liability remained nearly constant are ranked as benign. “Severity” seems not to correlate with economic impact of the reforms at all, which rather calls in to question what exactly they mean by “severe”.
If this is the case, what is the sensible remedy? Is it:
a) Anti-cartel measures, or
b) Making sure the premiums are genuinely high?
I’d also like to point out yet again that there exists an eminently wealthy, and just as classically evil class of people with an interest in stopping tort reform, namely trial lawyers. If this is a class war, why aren’t the lawyers getting theirs?
To summarize this thread: virtually no opposition from conservatives or others on the notion that the Bush tax cut for the wealthy and the attack on social security constitute attack on the poor and the middle class. Some opposition on the point about tort reform, mostly from Dead Badger who refuses to acknowledge that wealth people are less affected by these laws because they are, well, wealthier and hence less likely to be helpless in the face of medical malpractice. But it’s been fun to watch Fear Itself backing him into a corner. Vigorous opposition on the point about the bankruptcy law changes, but only on a minor point, i.e. that the law excluded the poor (but not the middle class). Absolutely no opposition to the point Hentor raised about the IRS auditing the poor and the middle class more and the wealthy less.
This is about as close to abject surrender as you’ll get from the conservatives on this board. The class war is on, it’s very obvious, but it’s gonna take a LOT of educating before we can make the gucks see it.
Well, if you are going to adopt overly simplistic and one sided measures such as awards caps, I see nothing wrong with including a premium cap in the same legislation. Once you start messing with the free market, you have to do it to all sides the maintain a level playing field. If you don’t, so-called ‘tort-reform’ is nothing but a windfall for the insurance companies, without demanding any specific performance from them in return. Over and over again, insurance industry executives have stated that tort reform will not lower premiums:
Ah, what fun. Post nothing of substance, and declare yourself the winner. I’m reminded of Wilde himself, who I believe once said: “what are you, some sort of twat?”
I guess it would be just ludicrously optimistic to ask for a cite regarding poor people receiving the most malpractice damages? Or is this another one of those things that ought to be “obvious”?
Firstly, I don’t think messing around with the legal system constitutes messing around with the free market, since the legal system is not supposed to be a market, free or otherwise. Indeed, most of the tort reforms proposed are aimed at addressing the fact that it is becoming a market, with favourable jurisdictions attracting the lion’s share of the civil suits. Premium caps will simply make certain amounts of risk uninsurable, which is not exactly a desirable outcome. By contrast, trying to ensure a little consistency in the evaluation of non-economic damages seems to me to be a worthwhile end in and of itself.
Secondly, you persist in arguing the point that the cap is or is not a great idea. I personally think it’s a) a bit low, and b) a bit crude. This is all entirely irrelevant, however, since the point I am arguing is whether the cap constitutes a class war or not. I still cannot see how this is possibly so, since the people who profit from large payouts are mainly lawyers and mainly rich. This is a class war only if you look only at the rich people who benefit and the poor people who lose out. The reality is that there are beneficiaries of reform both rich and poor, and there are rich and poor losers as well. Argue all you like about the pros and cons of a specific reform, but a class war it simply ain’t.
This is the most ridiculous contrivance you have posted yet. What is next, legislate away the right to sue companies to force them to observe product safety and environmental regulations? All are a cost of doing business, and no doubt corporate America would love to be free of any obligation to make restitution when the court finds them liable. Such restitution is a cost of doing business, and to unilaterally reduce such costs without demanding specific performance is nothing less than government playing sugar daddy to industry.
Ooh, the weight of rhetoric overwhelms me. Could you perhaps explain why I am wrong in saying the judicial system should not be a free market, or are you limited to declaring me “flatulent”? Is justice justice, or should jurisdictions compete to provide the “best” justice? Can you even point out where I suggested that civil liability ought to be nil? I was under the impression that a sensible debate could be had here, but if you’re going to resort to ad hominem and cut’n’pastes from www.centerjd.org, I frankly can’t be fucked. Should you bother to oppose an actual position I have taken, feel free to respond. Otherwise, just piss off. Jesus, it’s like the Dia de los Cerebro-muertos in here.
It makes sense that malpractice damages are most important to those of lower incomes. A poorer person who is rendered incapable of work by a medical screw up is less likely to savings and long term disablity policies to pay for their future needs.
That’s not exactly what the post was saying, but it goes to your later comments.
Damage caps are a remarkably inefficient way of addressing the problem of what are amusingly referred to as ‘Hell Holes of Justice.’ (Or such was the title of a paper put out by one of the tort deform groups, I apologize I cannot remember which). There are certainly jurisdictions that appear to be pro-plaintiff. If the aim is curing that, then look at jurisdictional laws. On the other side of the coin, none of those claiming to seek a fairer more rational tort system appear to recognize that there are jurisdictions that appear just as pro-defendant, especially some federal courts.
A quarter million is way more than ‘a bit low’ and way cruder than ‘a bit crude.’ $250,000 does not pay for much 24/7 medical attention. The people who suffer most from the cap are those who need the damages most; those who have suffered the greatest injury, and those who have the least ability to take care of themselves. Those who gain the most from the cap are the insurance companies, and surprise, surprise, it is them who are pushing hardest for it.
There really aren’t poor gainers from this. Insurance rates aren’t coming down, or so the evidence seems to suggest. I think class war is a kind of blunt way of putting this. But a transfer of money from those who have suffered long term, crippling injuries as a result of medical malpractice and into the pockets of the insurance companies seems accurate.
Let’s not forget the other victims here - the doctors who see their reputations sullied by insurance companies that refuse to fight frivolous suits, chosing instead to settle, and passing on the cost straight back to the doctors in higher premiums.
The $250k cap only applies to pain and suffering awards, not to actual damages. It does not limit the amount of damages that could be awarded to compensate for the costs of medical attention.
I didn’t look properly at what damages were being limited… Isn’t it Virginia that put a total damage cap at $2mm on medmal awards?
Yes, future medical costs should in theory be included in economic damages and as such are not limited under this. Unfortunately, that often doesn’t work, and economic damages dramatically undercompensate. Though of course that is not an argument against this directly, as it is not a perfect situation to boost someone’s P&S award to make up for receiving too little economic damages. However, one can see situations where someone’s long term enjoyment of life is dramatically curtailed. Let’s say a doctor’s mistake leaves someone totally and irrevocably impotent when they are 14. Assuming (conservatively) 50 years of potential sexual activity, they are left in the position possibly of having no economic damages (no future medical bills, no lost income),a nd beign capped at $5,000 per year for no sex. That’s not a bargain I would think of as especially fair at age 14.
