Opponents, critics and even some supporters of health care reform continue to speculate on potential glitches in the delivery of health care to the millions of Americans who otherwise would have gone without access to medical care. The latest gloom and doom prediction is that national health care reform will cause longer waits and add to the existing problem of overcrowding in hospital emergency rooms because of a perceived shortage of primary care or family physicians.

Is this true? Why aren’t there enough primary care physicians to go around?

One of the biggest reasons is that fewer and fewer medical students are choosing that field of medicine. “Family doctors” work longer hours for less money than most other specialties. These days, young doctors graduate medical school with $120,000.00 or more in student loans or debt, which makes the higher salaries offered to surgeons and other specialists more appealing. It is especially tempting to go into sub-specialties such as sports medicine that mostly serve the financially secure and well-insured patients.

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The families of the 11 victims of the Deepwater Horizon disaster faced severe limitations on their ability to seek justice for the tragic loss of their loved ones due to the negligence of BP and others. That was the case under the law before the House passed the SPILL Act (Securing Protections for the Injured from Limitations on Liability).

The SPILL ACT will actually correct the state of the law in a number of worthy areas that relate to the Gulf Disaster:

• Amends the Death on the High Seas Act to permit the recovery of non-economic damages; human damages, including the pain & suffering of families of the dead workers.
• Amends the Jones Act to permit the recovery of non-economic damages.
• Repeals the limitation of liability for vessel owners; limiting recovery to only the value of the vessel involved.
• Amends the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA) to make clear that states damaged by the Gulf Disaster can bring lawsuits and seek remedies in their own state courts.
• Makes contracts and agreements “gagging” individuals from disclosing information about offshore oil spills and discharge of other pollutants; agreements that reportedly BP attempted to enforce.
• Amends the US Bankruptcy Code preventing corporations liable for oil spills from severing their assets to avoid liabilities owed to injured victims. Among other things, the Act eliminates the ability for the debtor to seek additional protections afforded under Chapter 15 of the code.

The SPILL Act takes outdated laws and brings them into the 21^st century, according to House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi:

“The SPILL ACT will modernize these laws to ensure that BP and other responsible parties are held fully accountable for their actions and to ensure that families of those killed or injured in the BP oil spill and other such tragedies are justly compensated.”

The passage of this bill eliminates a few of the tools that responsible parties likely planned to use in an effort to limit the damages they owe to injured victims of the Gulf Disaster.

If the tort reformers are not hypocrites, they are likely to oppose these changes as victimizing corporations. If tort reformers avoid hypocrisy in this instance, one must wonder how they justify their position in this illustration of where going “easy” on corporate America has gotten us. If tort reformers are hypocrites in this instance, why listen to them about anything?

There is certainly no shortage of tort reform crusaders who have, in their private lives, sought the assistance of trial lawyers to bring exactly the type of lawsuits that they decry in public: then-Gov. George W. Bush filing suit over a minor fender-bender involving one of his daughters in which no one was hurt; Sen. Rick Santorum and his wife recovering $350,000 in “pain and suffering” damages in a medical malpractice lawsuit;Sen. Trent Lott enlisting a well-known trial lawyer to sue his insurance company over Hurricane Katrina damages; Judge Robert Bork asking for punitive damages (!) after tripping on some steps at the Yale Club. But no group has more forcefully championed tort reform over the years than the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. One of their mottos is “Jobs, Not Lawsuits.” But, in recent months, filing lawsuits seems to have become one of its jobs.

When, in August of this year, the Chamber threatened to sue the Environmental Protection Agency over regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, I just added that to the list of tort reform hypocrisies. But the Chamber jumped straight from the ridiculous to the sublime with its lawsuit, filed this week in federal district court, against the Yes Men. The Yes Men have made quite a name for themselves pretending to be spokespersons for prominent organizations, making false announcements that generate publicity and, they hope, pressure the organizations to make real changes. On October 19, they held a fake press conference announcing that the Chamber of Commerce had reversed its position on climate change policy, and promised to immediately cease lobbying against the Kerry-Boxer pollution reduction bill. They even had cable news organizations fooled for about an hour. The only “damage” that the Chamber of Commerce suffered was having public attention focused on its views about climate change. Yet the Chamber responded by filing a multi-count federal lawsuit. Or maybe the lawsuit itself is another hoax??? If not, this may rank as the Greatest Moment in Tort Reform Hypocrisy … for now.

Insurance companies are always out there wringing their hands, crying poor, and accusing everyone else for high insurance rates and, oh yeah, those “frivolous lawsuits”. The truth is the insurance industry was designated as a special class of corporation over 50 years ago. This special class was caused by exempting them from the McCarran-Ferguson act that prohibits monopolies, among other things.

This special exemption has permitted insurance companies to legally collude over pricing, effectively giving them an invitation to participate in price fixing and limiting market availability.

I have wanted to write an entire article about this whole issue a number of times, but I frankly never had the time to do all the research necessary.

Joanne Doroshow has done the work and written an excellent article for the Huffington Post. Her article is titled:
Medical Malpractice Insurers: Time to End Their License to Gouge.

I highly recommend reading this article that sets forth some of the best reasons why crying about frivolous lawsuits, tort reform and insurance company breaks is so much, well, lies.

Thank you, Ms. Doroshow.

I never thought I would be quoting him, but Newt Gingrich set forth the following on his website:

Allow me to pose these questions to you:

If the people do not have religious freedom, then do they have freedom of assembly?
If the people do not have religious freedom, then do they have freedom of speech?
If the people do not have religious freedom, do they have freedom of the press?
Can any nation which does not allow true religious liberty then call itself free?

The answer to all these questions, of course, is a resounding NO!

So, I assume that Newt would agree it is simple logic that:

If the people to do not have the freedom to seek justice in the courts, do they have any other freedoms? I suggest that, although Newt Gingrich supports tort reform, if he were to answer honestly, he would be compelled to say “a resounding NO!”

There is absolutely no statistical study honestly performed which can conclude that tort reform is good for anyone but insurance companies.

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Once upon a time there was an insurance crisis…a lawsuit crisis…a medical malpractice crisis…a series of crisis manufactured by industries who have a need for consumers to have someone other than them to blame. The insurance industry, the healthcare industry, Associated Industries — the business of business organizations; they all have very distinct business reasons for keeping consumers mad at trial lawyers. These businesses know that government does not have the time or resources to hold them accountable for negligence; sometimes intentional; and so, they keep throwing gasoline on the fire of the propaganda created disdain for trial lawyers.

When I have the opportunity to give speeches or hear them given in connection with tort reform and tort law in general, the conversation usually finds itself leading to a discussion of medical negligence, medical malpractice. From there, depending on the group, we talk about doctors “fleeing” states; excessive malpractice premiums; and, inevitably, the “McDonald’s coffee case”.

What does it take to file a medical negligence lawsuit in “good faith”? To truly understand that, you must understand the elements the plaintiff is required to prove in any lawsuit:

• Negligence – someone acted improperly—a deviation from the acceptable standard of care.
• Causation—the someone’s improper action caused damages (in whole or in part)
• Damages – the injury flowing from the act of negligence

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Lately, not a news cycle turns without an insurance company, a Wall Street firm, a bank or other corporate giant asking for a government bailout with our taxpayer money.

Ironically, these are the same Big Corporations that every year aggressively lobby the government to de-regulate their industries to allow for greater profit margins.

We have all heard corporate America’s battle cry before: More government intrusion will lead to decreased profits and thus harm the economy. If we fill the pockets of the rich, this will have a trickle-down effect on the rest of the population because the rich will spend money and create jobs. The truth of these ideas are the subject of much debate, but it is undeniable that corporations are an integral piece of our economic engine. They create new technologies, employ the workforce and increase our Gross Domestic Profit. It is also undeniable, given the recent economic downturn, that when corporations are left to their own devices, there is an element that will exploit the weak and powerless for their own gain. It is simply in the nature of Corporate America to place profits above all else, including Americans.

To those of us who are called on to fight these titans of corporate America on behalf of individuals, this most recent and seemingly incongruent request for government intervention by corporate America is nothing new. Corporate America has for years been talking out of both sides of its mouth when it comes to government involvement. While on the one hand, they have lobbied for less government and less taxes (in a further twist of irony, taxes are now being used to make up for their mismanagement), they have asked for government intervention before when it suits their needs. They have simply packaged this need as tort reform.

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