BlogWood: MT Archives

Tort reform scam

Jeb Bush and the Florida legislature pushed Medical tort reform on Florida this summer. It’s heating up as a national issue, as W attempts to scare and bribe doctors into signing up, all in the name of “fixing” malpractice rates.

Wampum has an excellent post up on the dishonest tactics employed by backers of “med mal reform”:

The media and the tort reform lobby constantly tells us that juries give out large awards in cases that are so absurd that they do not even pass the laugh test. People like Mort Zuckerman, Stuart Taylor and Evan Thomas report them as true.

Zuckerman would not award anything to the plaintiff in the cases he (falsely) reports. Taylor and Thomas would never award $70 million in a case in which the doctors made no error. Their friends would not make those awards.

Zuckerman, Thomas and Taylor, however, are prepared to believe that juries would make absurd awards because they are just so sure that they and their friends are so much smarter than people on juries. They are elitists.

People who think juries are stupid either have no experience with juries or think mighty highly of themselves. If juries make such absurd decisions, why are the reported cases so often fabrications? Why can not Zuckerman or Thomas or Taylor show us some examples of ridiculous awards that are actually true?

There is a huge, well funded interest group trying to pass tort reform. There are any number of journalists sympathetic to tort reform. If there are lots of crazy jury awards that stand up on appeal, why do we usually hear only the bogus ones?

Tort reformers and the media just make stuff up. They want you to believe that juries are irrational. They want you to believe that evidence, fairness and justice are irrelevant in the “litigation lottery.” They want to scare you.

They then use the fear their lies have generated to argue that we need tort reform legislation. It really is one big scam.