You may have heard or read the term "tort reform" recently regarding litigation and verdicts awarded to victims of nursing home abuse, medical malpractice, or defective products. If you were unclear as to what it meant, read on.
What is Tort Reform?
Tort reform is an effort to take away the average consumer's rights to fair compensation for substantial losses brought on by negligent manufacturers, doctors, nurses, or caregivers. Tort reform allows big businesses and other power players to get away with negligence, fraud, or other acts of harm. These corporations and insurance companies, along with their political counterparts and lobbyist, promote an aggressive campaign of propaganda, boasting false economic benefits of tort reform, in hopes to drum up popular support for limiting ordinary citizens their rights. These well-funded lobbyist push for caps on the recoveries that judges and juries can award in litigation and, in turn, aims to limit liability and allow companies to escape full and fair compensation to the people they injure.
Who is in Favor of Tort Reform?
Tort reform advocates are a coalition of insurance companies, HMO groups, pharmaceutical companies, big businesses, and other interests who want to protect companies from liability when they harm their own consumers.
Who is NOT in Favor of Tort Reform?
Contenders of tort reform include civil rights advocates, consumer advocate groups, plaintiffs attorneys, labor groups, state prosecutors, legal scholars, and more. Some of these entities include The
Public Citizen, The Committee for Justice for All, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers(MADD), The Center for Justice and Democracy, and The American Association for Justice.
Who is Harmed by Tort Reform?
Consumers are the victims of tort reform. Tort reform takes away your right to a fair case, in which an impartial judge or jury looks at the facts of your case to determine liability, if you are eligible for compensation, and what that compensation should be. We trust juries every day to determine if people are guilty of capital crimes and other serious offenses, but tort reformists claim that we shouldn't be able to count on them to determine fair compensation for someone whose life has been negatively affected by the negligence of another.
Particularly in the case of medical malpractice, doctors are made to appear the victims of the tort system. However, most of the damages paid to those harmed by medical malpractice comes from the deep pockets of the insurance industry. When tort reform legislations are passed and insurance companies are shielded from paying for the mistakes of their insured, they do not pass those savings down to doctors who are charged outrageous premiums to obtain medical malpractice insurance. Our doctors are simply being used as pawns in an effort by insurance companies to pay out less in damages, and raise premiums anyway.
Medical malpractice lawyers know of the dangers of tort reform and what it could mean for victims of negligence. In some states, reform legislation has been passed, and the face of justice is changing. In some states like Texas,, total recoveries are capped by the legislature (even though the actual damages suffered to by the victim is ten times the amount). Tort Reformists, medical malpractice insurance lobbyists, and corporate nursing homes all desperately want to prevent ordinary citizens from fair compensation for injuries that could potentially afflict them for the rest of their lives. These tort reformists and HMO lobbyist supporters want the government to place caps on how much a jury is allowed to compensate injured patients.
Can you imagine the conflict of interest? A politician who takes campaign dollars from pro-tort reform corporations like Exxon, making a law that forbids a jury who has heard the evidence of the corporate wrongdoing to compensate the victims of malpractice for all of the harm they have suffered - no matter what. Should an elected official make a law that says $100,000 is fair for causing a young mother of 4 children to lose a breast to cancer? Should a politician who take campaign contributions from the insurance lobbyist be able to prevent a jury from awarding more than $250,000 for causing a father of small children to spend a lifetime in a wheel chair? Why should a politician make a law that forbids a jury from awarding more that $300,000 for a child who will live the rest of his or her life with a debilitating brain injury and have 10 times that amount in medical bills?
These "tort reform" caps on mothers, fathers and children's compensation would also eliminate the possibility of punitive damages in the case of willful and intentional conduct. Monetary punishments are one of the few effective ways to hold corporate wrongdoers accountable for purposefully harming consumers in the name of profit.
These "tort reform" measures are so burdensome, that just recently it was revealed that woman who lost both of her legs to admitted medical negligence can't find a lawyer confident enough in their judicial system to take on her case.
The bottom line is that this called "Tort reform" is being pushed by insurance company lobbyist and big business because it would immunize the vast majority of corporate nursing homes, product manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, car manufacturers, banks and home builders.
In this era of BP Oil spills, Enron, Hurricane Katrina fraud, Ponzi schemes, suddenly accelerating cars and fraudulent foreclosures, why would anybody support these "tort reform" measures that forbid ordinary citizens the right to a jury trial and fair damages?
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