I saw part on HBO piece on tort reform last night and it was petty enlightening. It was pretty clear that show was against it and they presented a fair amount of information to back their position. I am against frivolous litigation as much as the next guy but some of the remedies don’t seem much better, caps on jury awards being one of them. One example was a doctor found by a jury to be negligent resulting in severe, lifelong disability for an infant. The calculations (presumably done by the plaintiff) showed the lifelong costs to be around $5.6 million. The state law however, has a cap of $1.25 million. Who picks up the rest? The taxpayer, of course. The family goes broke.
The arguments put forth in favor of caps included one that said premiums would come down if awards weren’t so high. A stat was then presented that showed that premiums in states with caps were actually higher, on average, than those without. I know stats can be spun any which way and there’s probably more to the story.
I also had no idea how prevalent mandatory arbitration clauses were in things such as credit card agreements, cell phone service provider agreements and, in particular, employment agreements. The case of a Halliburton employee who was gang raped by fellow employees (allegedly) was the example cited. The employee had given up her right to sue her employer when she was hired. Instead, she agreed to have any complaints heard by an arbitrator. Everything is done in secret. An arbitrator who is supposed to be neutral but is employed by a company hired by Halliburton. How can that not be a conflict? How can he be neutral? According to the show, 90% of all cases that go to arbitration result in the employer “winning”. Un-named sources said that is common for an arbitrator to be blackballed if they find for the plaintiff/consumer.
The last part that I saw had to do with campaign financing by U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a non-governmental organization that backs the election of judges and legislatures that are pro-business. Carl Rove was a prime player in this group years ago. What sounds like a pretty harmless group actually spends millions to unseat candidates not to their liking and is able to do it without revealing the sources of its funding.
I am no liberal or conspiracy buff but some of the stuff was pretty scary. Let’s hear it from some pro-tort reformers. Convince me that ambulance-chasing lawyers are a bigger threat to me than organizations like U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Insurance companies can stop frivolous suits easily… by fighting them. Contingent lawyers won’t bring frivolous suits if they are going to be a money loser. Short-termism on the part of the insurance companies, though, ignores this and calculates settling is more important for this years balance sheet. Which just means the claims continue.
There’s no need to undermine hundreds of years of tort law to protect insurance companies.
They have no reason to fight them because frivolous lawsuits are not a problem. Of course some happen and we have all heard some horror story or other but in the scheme of things they aren’t even a blip on the insurance companies spreadsheets.
If a lawsuit if frivolous, the plaintiff’s attorney spends lots of time and lots of money, and in the end, recovers nothing.
If a defense is frivolous (i.e., the defendant should pay what is owed or offer something reasonable, but does neither) the defense attorney gets paid an hourly fee for a couple of years.
Given these economic incentives, guess which is more common, frivolous claims or frivolous defenses?
Something I advocate is to separate, where appropriate, compensation and fault. A patient with a poor medical outcome has a need for financial compensation unrelated to whether malpractice was committed. One can implement my idea in either a “libertarian” model or in a more “socialistic” model; in the former case patients could buy optional insurance before a medical procedure which would compensate them for a poor outcome independent of any “blame.”
This would be more efficient, eliminate some wasteful litigation, and create better incentives. True, malpractice litigation would no longer be doing the job of identifying incompetent practitioners, but that’s a job it does very poorly as is.
If insurance companies (and companies in general) are worried about paying out big settlements, I have an easy solution: DON"T DO THINGS THAT GET YOU SUED! :rolleyes: People need a means to be made whole when companies screw them over.
That doesn’t work, because it isn’t the insurance companies doing things that get them sued. In the case of medical malpractice suits, it’s the physicians and surgeons doing things wrong.
But the problem is that the present system mixes up two important objectives:
(1) helping the victims of medical mistakes and malpractice.
(2) preventing the medical mistakes and malpractice.
Unfortunately, it does neither of these very well, as well as putting money into the pockets of lawyers (on both sides of tort cases) that would be better spent on helping victims.
Giles-If doctors don’t want to be sued, DON’T SCREW UP!! It’s not that complicated a concept. If they are worried about being sued, go into a different line of work. Alternately, if you don’t want to line the pockets of lawyers, don’t force/encourage doctors to buy malpractice insurance. Without the insurance, the’ll be ALOT more careful.
Yes, but the doctors don’t pay when they screw up – the insurance company pays.
If doctors did not have malpractice insurance, they’d be likely to practice a lot more defensive medicine, e.g., tests on patients just in case, when the cost of the tests cannot be objectively justified by the likely help that they provide. They don’t pay for the cost of the tests, but if they don’t have the tests, they would worry that they might be sent bankrupt by a patient suing them.
Q.But critics of the current system say that 10 to 15 percent of medical costs are due to medical malpractice.
A. That’s wildly exaggerated. According to the actuarial consulting firm Towers Perrin, medical malpractice tort costs were $30.4 billion in 2007, the last year for which data are available. We have a more than a $2 trillion health care system. That puts litigation costs and malpractice insurance at 1 to 1.5 percent of total medical costs. That’s a rounding error. Liability isn’t even the tail on the cost dog. It’s the hair on the end of the tail.
This completely neglects the cost of defensive medicine. How many playground bumps and bruises end up in a CAT scan or MRI, when a reasonable response is an icepack and an NSAID?
How many patients are on statins because their doctor doesn’t want to stand in front of a jury and explain why treating 1,000 patients to prevent one heart attack is both bad medicine and bad business? If their patient is the one with a heart attack explaining that 999 people were spared the expense and side effects of needless therapy doesn’t do a bit of good.
The jury system punishes doctors not for bad medicine, but for bad outcomes.
You underestimate his role in the Bush administration. Rove had a better chance of being elected into the administration if he never actually had to get a vote.
Yes, when you have to pay for it. I suspect that part of the extra cost of the U.S. health care system, compared with the rest of the developed world, is extra diagnostic tests which don’t improve the outcomes of the system for patients. It’s partly defensive medicine, just in case of a tort suit, and partly that (in most cases) the patient doesn’t pay, and the doctor often gets extra income as well as legal protection.
Why do you think a doctor has to screw up in order to be sued? All he or she has to do is be involved (even if only peripherally) in a case where a bad outcome occurs.