Immunity
February 21, 2012 - by
Last year when I decided to work with the trial lawyers I took a fair amount of razzing from my Republican friends – among Republicans, lawyers are not as unpopular as the Huns but it’s close. As best as I can tell the last lawyer Republicans admired was Cicero.
Anyhow, last year there were two bills in the legislature on Tort Reform: Medical Malpractice Reform and General Tort Reform and reading either is like watching paint dry but what they do is actually interesting.
As best I can tell after a year of studying, the law – in general – rests on three principles: 1) Protecting the innocent from wrongdoers; 2) Personal responsibility – if you do wrong you’re responsible; and 3) juries are the best way to decide who’s wrong and what to do about it.
Medical Malpractice Reform rode roughshod over all three principles. The bill’s sponsors put their case this way: They said, There’re too many frivolous lawsuits and they’re costing a lot of people money and they’re driving up health care costs and that hurts everyone.
So their goal was to end frivolous lawsuits. Which sounds fine. If a lawyer’s suing people left and right for no good reason then the law should protect the innocent victims.
But, as it turned out, that’s not exactly what happened.
Instead of taking irresponsible lawyers to task the bill’s sponsors went in another direction entirely. They set out to give hospitals and doctors who commit malpractice in the ER legal immunity. How it worked was simple: If a hospital was dead wrong and made a mistake in the E.R. it didn’t have any personal responsibility. Not one bit. It didn’t have to fix it. It didn’t have to make amends. It had immunity from personal responsibility.
Malpractice Reform also capped jury awards in other malpractice cases – in effect giving other doctors a partial immunity. And, finally, the bill said juries no longer had the final say in verdicts. In effect, the bill’s sponsors said, We’re going to let juries decide verdicts up to a point but beyond that point take over and limit the verdict. The problem with that is clear cut: Who do you trust to decide verdicts – jurors or politicians who take contributions from the people they grant immunity to?
The second part of Tort Reform – General Tort Reform – was supported by pharmaceutical corporations. For instance, Avandia is a drug sold to treat diabetes but it turned out it had two side effects: It caused people who took it to have strokes and heart attacks.
Which didn’t just affect patients who took the drug – because most of the health care in our county is paid for by Medicare and Medicaid and every time a patient on Medicare taking Avandia had a stroke the taxpayer paid for it.
Anyhow, the pharmaceutical companies decided they needed a bill to give them immunity when they sold drugs like Avandia. The whole idea turned the law on its head: Suddenly legislators were passing a law that protected the wrongdoer instead of the innocent victim.
The bill sailed through the House with bi-partisan support and there is a hearing on it in the Senate today.
Most conservatives are all for personal responsibility and when legislators said they were going to end frivolous lawsuits it sounded like that’s what they had mind. But that’s not what they did at all. Instead they gave people and corporations immunity from personal responsibility.
Posted in North Carolina - Republicans, Raleigh
Immunity
February 21, 2012/
Last year when I decided to work with the trial lawyers I took a fair amount of razzing from my Republican friends – among Republicans, lawyers are not as unpopular as the Huns but it’s close. As best as I can tell the last lawyer Republicans admired was Cicero.
Anyhow, last year there were two bills in the legislature on Tort Reform: Medical Malpractice Reform and General Tort Reform and reading either is like watching paint dry but what they do is actually interesting.
As best I can tell after a year of studying, the law – in general – rests on three principles: 1) Protecting the innocent from wrongdoers; 2) Personal responsibility – if you do wrong you’re responsible; and 3) juries are the best way to decide who’s wrong and what to do about it.
Medical Malpractice Reform rode roughshod over all three principles. The bill’s sponsors put their case this way: They said, There’re too many frivolous lawsuits and they’re costing a lot of people money and they’re driving up health care costs and that hurts everyone.
So their goal was to end frivolous lawsuits. Which sounds fine. If a lawyer’s suing people left and right for no good reason then the law should protect the innocent victims.
But, as it turned out, that’s not exactly what happened.
Instead of taking irresponsible lawyers to task the bill’s sponsors went in another direction entirely. They set out to give hospitals and doctors who commit malpractice in the ER legal immunity. How it worked was simple: If a hospital was dead wrong and made a mistake in the E.R. it didn’t have any personal responsibility. Not one bit. It didn’t have to fix it. It didn’t have to make amends. It had immunity from personal responsibility.
Malpractice Reform also capped jury awards in other malpractice cases – in effect giving other doctors a partial immunity. And, finally, the bill said juries no longer had the final say in verdicts. In effect, the bill’s sponsors said, We’re going to let juries decide verdicts up to a point but beyond that point take over and limit the verdict. The problem with that is clear cut: Who do you trust to decide verdicts – jurors or politicians who take contributions from the people they grant immunity to?
The second part of Tort Reform – General Tort Reform – was supported by pharmaceutical corporations. For instance, Avandia is a drug sold to treat diabetes but it turned out it had two side effects: It caused people who took it to have strokes and heart attacks.
Which didn’t just affect patients who took the drug – because most of the health care in our county is paid for by Medicare and Medicaid and every time a patient on Medicare taking Avandia had a stroke the taxpayer paid for it.
Anyhow, the pharmaceutical companies decided they needed a bill to give them immunity when they sold drugs like Avandia. The whole idea turned the law on its head: Suddenly legislators were passing a law that protected the wrongdoer instead of the innocent victim.
The bill sailed through the House with bi-partisan support and there is a hearing on it in the Senate today.
Most conservatives are all for personal responsibility and when legislators said they were going to end frivolous lawsuits it sounded like that’s what they had mind. But that’s not what they did at all. Instead they gave people and corporations immunity from personal responsibility.
Posted in North Carolina - Republicans, Raleigh