Professional and hospital liability insurers have convinced their customers that malpractice premiums will go down if meritorious malpractice claims are capped by the state legislature. But look what happened in Florida. According to Tallahassee.com, "the Legislature three years ago capped pain and suffering awards to $500,000 per physician and $1…
The Economic Policy Institute has a different take on the impact of "tort reform" on the economy. An excerpt: The legal system for adjudicating tort claims in the United States delivers important bene?ts to the American people. Most notably, these benefits include the compensation of injured persons (including people harmed…
In a recent post I set out in their entirety the comments of a doctor who told us of the fear he has testifying on behalf of plaintiffs in medical negligence cases. He has written back – and here it is: NOTE: there are a bunch of unusal characters…
That’s the name of a new report issued by Public Citizen. From the press release: "Public Citizen reviewed publicly available information from 1990 to 2005 from the federal government’s National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB), which contains data on malpractice payments made on behalf of doctors as well as disciplinary actions…
Just one segment of an op-ed piece in today’s Tennessean: "How bad is medical malpractice? According to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association by Dr. Barbara Starfield of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, the third-leading cause of death in this country after heart problems and…
I wrote two posts in the last year (here and here)about doctors who have been attacked by organized medicine for giving testimony on behalf of plaintiffs in medical malpractice lawsuits. The goal of these efforts is not only to punish the doctors for having the audacity to testify for a…
The property and casualty insurance industry has reported after-tax profits of $44.9 billion for the first nine months of 2006, up 50.1% from a year earlier. If this path continues for the last three months of the year, it "would lead insurers to their best financial performance in nearly 20 years,"…
The Oklahoma Supreme Court has struck down a requirement that an affidavit of merit from an expert be filed with medical negligence lawsuits. The statute at issue "requires that a plaintiff alleging medical malpractice attach an affidavit to the petition stating that the plaintiff: 1) has consulted with a qualified…
Remember Newt Gingrich? Of course you do. Former Speaker of the House. Author of the Contract on America. And now, the author of a new list of issues for Republicans to focus on during the coming months, which he titles "11 Ways to Say: "We’re Not Nancy Pelosi." His introduction: …
Do you want to see how the tort deform movement has made an impact on the laws of the fifty states (and D.C.)? See this article. The abstract: “This manuscript contains the most detailed, complete and comprehensive legal dataset of tort reforms in the U.S. The dataset records state laws…