This blog is provided by http://www.SpringsAttorney.com the moderator is Attorney Edward A. (”Ted”) Bills, a personal/bodily injury attorney with offices in Colorado Springs, CO 80906. If you would like to talk with Attorney Bills, please call 719.444.1000
In my personal and professional opinion it is the insurance companies – not personal injury lawyers – who are gouging doctors and the public.
Anyone with a television set has seen the airwaves flooded with commercials about how doctors are being driven away by lawyers and personal injury malpractice lawsuits. TV stations show doctors actually picketing and blaming trial lawyers for the skyrocketing premiums they have to pay. Doctors threaten to quit the practice of medicine and to move to other states with lower insurance premiums.
This is a story as familiar as it is misleading. When I reviewed statements filed by medical malpractice insurers in the Washington, DC area they show that lawsuits are actually going down, claims are going down, but rates are still going up.
It is hard to understand how attacking personal injury lawyers, taking away injured patients legal rights, imposing “caps” on jury awards, or any of the other things that have been advanced as “explanations” for this will help the situation.
The statistics in DC mirror what is occurring around the nation. An analysis of a national study of the 15 leading malpractice insurer carriers showed that premiums doubled – doubled! – yet paid claims remained flat since 2000.
In a recent issue of the Washington Monthly, Stephanie Mencimer debunked the myth of the so-called Personal injury “lawsuit crisis” and disclosed how the media played along. With anti-trial lawyer rhetoric reaching a fever pitch, this important article rebuts the lies that are being told about personal injury lawyers, so-called ‘frivolous lawsuits’ and the fictitious notion of a ‘lawsuit crisis’ in this country.
In her article, Ms. Mencimer noted “Last December, Newsweek featured a cover package by Stuart Taylor and Evan Thomas that blared: “Lawsuit Hell: Doctors, Teachers, Coaches, [and] Ministers. They all share a common fear: being sued on the job.” Paired with a weeklong tie-in on NBC News and online chats on MSNBC.com, the article [in Newsweek] claimed that because “Americans will sue each other at the slightest provocation,” the country is suffering from an “onslaught of litigation” that costs Americans $200 billion a year. The story was full of tales claiming to illustrate Americans’ overarching sense of legal entitlement and desire to “win a jackpot from a system that allows sympathetic juries to award plaintiffs not just real damages” but millions more for the impossible-to-measure ‘pain and suffering’ and highly arbitrary ‘punitive damages.’
“Among others, the story featured a softball tournament organizer, a minister, and a doctor who all claimed to have modified their behavior because they were terrified of lawsuits. Ryan Warner, an insurance salesman in Page, Ariz., told Newsweek that he had recently cancelled an annual charity softball tournament because an injured player had sued the city of Page for $100,000. Warner said that he worried he might be added as a defendant.
“The story as published, though, lacks a few critical details. Newsweek didn’t mention, for instance, that the 1997 federal Volunteer Protection Act ensures that people like Warner are immunized from these types of lawsuits. The article also excluded the injured man, Richard Sawyer, a locomotive engineer who suffered a dislocated ankle and a spiral fracture to the fibula–and missed months of work as a result–after he slid into a base that was supposed to break away on impact but didn’t because the city hadn’t followed the manufacturer’s instructions for maintaining these fixtures properly, according to Kevin Garrison, Sawyer’s lawyer.
“The event organizers had insurance–required by the city–to protect against exactly this kind of situation, but Warner cancelled the tournament anyway because he says the lawsuit was “a hassle.” Canceling the tournament proved a smart PR move, as it brought out an immense amount of pressure on Sawyer to drop his suit, says Garrison. The case was settled this January for an undisclosed amount and Warner was never named. In fact, the tournament has been revived and scheduled for early September.
“Not only were the particulars of the Newsweek story misleading. The essence of the story was wrong, too. Newsweek’s “onslaught” of lawsuits simply hasn’t happened. According to the National Center for State Courts, a research group funded by state courts, personal injury and other tort filings, when controlled for population growth, have declined nationally by 8 percent since the 1975, and have been falling steadily in real numbers since 1996. The numbers are even more dramatic in places with rapid population growth, like Texas, where the rate of tort filings fell 37 percent between 1990 and 2000. Even in liberal California, the rate of filings has plummeted 45 percent over the past decade. And those overly sympathetic juries Newsweek derides as so eager to dole out big bucks to injured victims?
In 2001, they voted against plaintiffs in 75 percent of all medical malpractice trials, according to the federal government’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS).
In an interview, Taylor dismisses these numbers as insignificant compared with the tort system’s $200 billion drag on the economy. “The costs of the tort system to society have gone up astronomically,” he says. That figure, though, comes from the insurance-industry consulting firm Tillinghast-Towers Perrin (TTP), which includes in its definition of the “tort system” insurance company administrative costs and overhead and the salaries of highly paid insurance company CEOs (Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, chairman of AIG, one of the world’s largest insurance companies, makes $29 million a year). One thing TTP doesn’t include: court budgets, which makes its study seem a lot more like an assessment of the insurance industry than of the legal system.
It’s not as though Newsweek wasn’t aware of these facts. On Friday, Dec. 5, a day before the story went to press, Taylor contacted the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA) for a quote. ATLA relayed the request to the nonprofit Center for Justice and Democracy (CJD), whose director, Joanne Doroshow, emailed Taylor information that contradicted some of the assertions in the story, including the state court data and a critique of the TTP study. (Doroshow provided the entire email exchange to The Washington Monthly.) Taylor dismissed it all, telling Doroshow, “Based on your many emails to me over the past 24 hours, you have very little thoughtful analysis to contribute to that debate.”
Taylor did, however, take lots of his information from Philip K. Howard, the founder of Common Good, a group funded by corporations and physicians seeking to limit their legal liability for wrongdoing. Common Good’s agenda includes advocating for legislation that would end the civil jury’s role in many lawsuits. To advance the cause, Common Good helps reporters generate anti-lawsuit articles by distributing colorful litigation horror stories from around the country–the story from the Arizona Sun about Warner’s softball tournament, for instance, was linked on Common Good’s Web site a few months before the Newsweek story appeared.
Incidentally, Howard also works for the law firm of Covington & Burling, which represents Newsweek’s parent company. Post-Newsweek Inc. has been sued a number of times for employment discrimination and was hit with an $8.3 million verdict in 1999, a fact that Newsweek didn’t mention in the story.”
