Posts Tagged trial bar
Bingo!
Atlanta anesthesiologist Dr. Tod Rubin says in an op/ed piece in today’s Washington Times what many of us have been thinking:
The suggestion by President Obama to provide a paltry $50 million to institute a medical liability pilot program is just another example of how insincere, deceptive and ignorant he remains on the substantive issues affecting our health care system. To infer that giving each state $1 million to study the medical malpractice liability issues it faces is laughable.
Dr. Rubin, who is a board member of Docs 4 Patient Care, presents a common-sense three-point plan to combat the problem of abusive medical malpractice lawsuits. Fear of such lawsuits force physicians to practice defensive medicine that in turn increases the costs of our health care system by $200 billion to $400 billion per year.
The Obama plan to provide $1m per state to study the issue is too clever by a half. The President hopes to fool us into thinking he’s serious about med mal reform when the reality is that there is plenty of evidence that reform could save hundreds of billions of health care dollars each year. The President is both unwilling to stand up to the trial bar that funds his political operation and unwilling to shoot straight with the American public. No wonder his health care proposal is in such choppy waters.
Read Dr. Rubin’s full piece here.
defensive medicine, Docs 4 Patient Care, Dr. Tod Rubin, health care reform, Lawsuit Abuse, Medical maplractice, op/ed, President Obama, reform, trial bar, Washington Times
Screeching Hypocrisy
By now you’ve likely heard liberals screech that the Citizens United ruling will allow corporate interests to dominate the political process. Lost in the noise is the reality that all it does is give business interests a fighting chance to go toe to toe with the trial bar.
In “The Majority Leader of the Lawsuit Lobby” at National Review, our friend Jim Copland takes a look at the “unprecedented” bidding being done on behalf of the trial bar by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. That’s the same Harry Reid who’s taken in over $2m from non-lobbyist lawyers. Copland notes:
Over this election cycle, Senator Reid’s campaign and leadership committees have raked in over $2 million from non-lobbyist lawyers, more than twice as much as he has received from any other industry or profession. Four of Reid’s seven largest campaign donors are law firms, and these aren’t corporate-law firms helping to structure the financials for Las Vegas casinos but rather out-of-state plaintiffs’ firms, including asbestos firms in New York, Maryland, and Illinois, as well as a toxic-tort firm in California.
Copland explores the substantial return that the trial bar has received on their investment in Reid. He finds that the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act ended up a “bonanza for the litigation industry”, that the trial bar used the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to gut “the statute of limitations in pay-discrimination claims”, and that the trial bar/Reid agenda is just getting going.
So in the eyes of big government liberals all is well when the trial bar steers millions to the Senate majority leader but it’s a crisis for the Supreme Court to allow corporations to exercise free speech. Only in Washington.
Citizens United, contributions, Harry Reid, Jim Copland, lobbying, National Review, trial bar
The Public Gets It
Like many Americans we’ll be paying close attention to tomorrow’s Health Care Summit. A new national survey by Public Opinion Strategies includes the following very interesting finding:
When asked an open-ended question about the one or two reform ideas they would most like to see emerge from the meeting, Republicans and Independents would put medical liability much higher on the agenda than what is being discussed in Washington.
Needless to say we couldn’t agree more. The need for medical liability reform is the sleeping giant of the health care debate. By embracing it Democrats could score a hat trick: a) find enough common ground to get agreement with Republicans, b) tackle one of the major cost drivers that is essential to actually getting control of health care costs, and c) catch up with the public!
But will the trial bar let them do what’s good for the country? Do we really need to answer that?
health care costs, Health Care Summit, medical liability reform, medical malpractice reform, research, trial bar, Trial Lawyers
AJP Briefs U.S. Supreme Court
In July, AJP filed an amicus curiae brief in the U.S. Supreme Court on the constitutionality of state laws prohibiting corporations from exercising political speech by making candidate-related expenditures. The high court invited briefing on the question of whether the Court should reverse its 1989 decision in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce that allows states to ban corporate sponsored political speech.
In its brief, AJP Counsel Cleta Mitchell and her litigation partner, Michael Lockerby, of the Foley & Lardner, LLP, law firm, urged the high court to invalidate as unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds the myriad state laws that prohibit corporations from making candidate-related expenditures in state elections.
As AJP told the Supreme Court in its brief:
“While silencing AJP solely because it is a corporation, [state laws barring corporate political speech] leave voters free to hear the viewpoints of AJP’s political opponents, who are not subject to the same political speech restrictions as those imposed on AJP. AJP was formed to combat the well-organized efforts of trial lawyers to influence state legislation and policies related to civil justice reform. Personal injury lawyers actively engage in the political process to protect and promote candidates and policies that oppose, repeal, or chip away at tort reform laws. Trial lawyers are able to use their “immense aggregations of wealth” to engage in unlimited political speech, while AJP and its members are not.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling could come at any time.
If AJP is successful, it will be a huge victory for the business community in fighting the trial bar, which for too long has had the resources and legal protections to support and oppose candidates, while AJP has been severely restricted in the manner in which its voice - and that of its members - can be heard.
Click Here to download the brief.
AJP, candidates, Cleta Mitchell, corporations, first amendment, Foley & Lardner, Michael Lockerby, political speech, Supreme Court, trial bar
Trial Lawyer Congress to States: “Don’t Even Think About It”
It’s never a surprise when the Democrat Congress pulls a muscle carrying water for the trial bar. But now the lawsuit obsessed pairing is demanding that states embrace their agenda or pay a price.
The evidence is buried in Nancy Pelosi’s 1,900 page health care bill. Why so long? Capitol Confidential at Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government has a theory:
It is much easier to dispense goodies to favored interest groups if they are surrounded by a lot of legislative legalese. For example, check out this juicy morsel to the trial lawyers (page 1431-1433 of the bill):
Section 2531, entitled “Medical Liability Alternatives,” establishes an incentive program for states to adopt and implement alternatives to medical liability litigation. [But]…… a state is not eligible for the incentive payments if that state puts a law on the books that limits attorneys’ fees or imposes caps on damages.
The trial-lawyer majority in Congress is not only telling state’s how to do their own business, they’re banning a proven savings method simply because the trial bar doesn’t approve. The trial lawyers majority has exposed their true colors: opposition to any meaningful reform of the medical malpractice system.
Since when do state’s need approval from Congress to try to control health care costs or run their own legal systems?
Medical malpractice reform is a proven two-fer. It creates a more rational court system and could achieve huge health care savings according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. From the Washington Post on October 9, 2009:
Lawmakers could save as much as $54 billion over the next decade by imposing an array of new limits on medical malpractice lawsuits, congressional budget analysts said today — a substantial sum that could help cover the cost of President Obama’s overhaul of the nation’s health system.
New research shows that legal reforms would not only lower malpractice insurance premiums for medical providers, but would also spur providers to save money by ordering fewer tests and procedures aimed primarily at defending their decisions in court, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, wrote in a letter to Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).
Perhaps the lesson here should be never be surprised when Congress torpedoes a good idea - especially when the trial bar opposes the good idea.
caps, Democrat Congress, health care reform, lawyer fees, malpractice insurance, Medical maldpractice, trial bar
An 83% solution - that’s dead on arrival
Serious students of health care reform recognize you’re hard pressed to achieve meaningful savings without reforming the malpractice system that forces doctors to practice defensive medicine.
And serious students of politics realize that asking the party of the trial bar to embrace meaningful legal reforms is as likely as the Washington Nationals mounting a late run for the pennant.
Philip K. Howard lays it all out in a piece titled “Why Medical Malpractice Is Off Limits” from the Wall Street Journal.
The upshot is simple: A few thousand trial lawyers are blocking reforms that would benefit 300 million Americans.
The American public also favors legal overhaul. A recent Common Good/Committee for Economic Development poll found that 83% of Americans believe that “as part of any health care reform plan, Congress needs to change the medical malpractice system.”
But of course the trial bar has a stranglehold on scores of Capitol Hill Democrats who are protecting their deep-pocketed benefactors at nearly every turn.
Congress now realizes it can’t completely stonewall legal reform. But what has unfolded so far is a series of vague pronouncements and token proposals - all of which assiduously avoid any specific ideas that might offend the trial bar.
The real tragedy is that trial lawyer greed both hurts legitimate victims and is trumping a solution that so many different experts agree is worth a try.
But under the current system, 54 cents of the malpractice dollar goes to lawyers and administrative costs, according to a 2006 study in the New England Journal of Medicine. And because the legal process is so expensive, most injured patients without large claims can’t even get a lawyer. “It would be hard to design a more inefficient compensation system,” says Michelle Mello, a professor of law and public health at Harvard, “or one which skewed incentives more away from candor and good practices.”
As for the trial bar’s cry that they’re the only guardian of victims of medical mistakes - well Howard puts that claim to the test.
Trial lawyers also suggest they alone are the bulwark against ineffective care, citing a 1999 study by the Institute of Medicine that “over 98,000 people are killed every year by preventable medical errors.” But the same study found that distrust of the justice system contributes to these errors by chilling interaction between doctors and patients. Trial lawyers haven’t reduced the errors. They’ve caused the fear.
Former Sen. John Edwards, for example, made a fortune bringing 16 cases against hospitals for babies born with cerebral palsy. Each of those tragic cases was worth millions in settlement. But according to a 2006 study at the National Institutes of Health, in nine out of 10 cases of cerebral palsy nothing done by a doctor could have caused the condition.
So as they used to say “follow the bouncing ball.” It’s in the Democrats court now - unless of course the trial bar has already snatched it and hid it in their pocket.
cerebral palsy, Committee for Economic Development, Common Good, Congress, defensive medicine, Democrats, greed, Harvard Law, health care reform, Institute of Medicine, legal reform, medical errors, medical malpractice, Michelle Mello, National Institutes of Health, New England Journal of Medicine, Philip K. Howard, public opinion survey, savings, trial bar, Trial Lawyers
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