A co-worker prattled on about "tort reform" and why we need it.

[eyesroll]

I asked him to define a tort.

This ended the conversation.


I think I'm on to something here...

[ComerPerro]

1. LMFAO

:rofl:

[Richard Steele]

3. May I join you?

:rofl: :rofl:

[wakeme2008]

5. Me three

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

[BlooInBloo]

17. I wish I knew how to do those....

I'll have to settle for the lo-tech version :(

lolroflmao!

[Richardo]

20. colon rofl colon

That'll get you your rofl smilie.

Welcome to DU! :toast:

[BlooInBloo]

28. thx rico!

Let's give it a shot :rofl:

Let's try a logical extension of your advice: :lmao:

:)

[BlooInBloo]

29. d@mn...

I really wanted to see a butt falling off of a smiley :rofl:

[Richardo]

32. When you post, look right above the space for the Subject...

You'll see a hyperlink for the 'Smilies lookup table'. Click and thou shalt be rewarded...

[BlooInBloo]

33. mmm... rewards.... lol - thx!

:spray:

[dogday]

38. Medical Tort Reform is where it hurts

$250,000 cap on non-economic damages awarded by juries against physicians sued for malpractice here in Houston...

[Captain Hilts]

2. And, no, that woman didn't get millions for the McDonalds' coffee.

McDonalds had had a couple hundred other complaints about coffee temperatures, by the way.

She got about 20K, I believe.

[roseBudd]

7. The McDonald's coffee case is = to Don Pablo's serving sizzling fajitas

at a drive through window. Normal temp coffee does not burn. Coffee that hot is = to boiling water on the stove.

[Walt Starr]

23. Yup, the coffee in question was superheated

and gave that woman third degree burns.

[rsdsharp]

14. Mrs. Liebeck originally asked for $20,000 to settle her case.

She had suffered 3rd degree burns on 6% of her body (including her genitals) and had been hospitalized for 8 days. McDonalds countered with an offer of $800 -- about the average amount they had paid in the 700 previous settlements.

At trial, the jury awarded her $200,000 in compensatory damages, reduced to $160,000 because they also found her to 20% at fault. They awarded $2.7 million in punitive damages (an amount equal to 2 days of McDonalds coffe sales worldwide). The judge reduced that to $480,000 -- three times compensatory damges. The judgment entered was for $640,000. The case settled on appeal -- probably for less than that amount.

It's important to remember, when the tort reformers wave this case as a banner, that 79 year -old Mrs. Liebeck was a passenger in car that was not in motion at the time of the accident. She put the cup between her legs to pry off the lid, because it was McDonalds policy not to add cream and sugar to their coffee -- not even to drive through customers. The additions were served on the side, and the only way to add them was to get the lid off. Couple that with the fact that they required the coffee to be brewed at temperatures bewtwen 195-205 degrees and sold at 180-190 degrees, this was a disaster waiting to happen.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

27. don't forget that the jury learned of Mac's deceit in discovery.

they lied about the numbers of previous claims, prior injuries.

[mcscajun]

16. She got a bit more than that, but I still keep this link handy to shut dow

the "tort reform" morans.

http://library.findlaw.com/2000/Mar/1/126400.html

[LSK]

4. Rush didnt explain the details n/t

[Coexist]

11. Lol!

good one.

[Democrats_win]

6. That was an unexpected twist. Tort reform: gopper-speak for bend over.

[Norquist Nemesis]

8. LOL! Next ask him to define "smaller government"

I keep hearing that one, too.

[Missy Vixen]

9. Ask him how he'd respond to my friend Ronnie and her family

who are now raising her 13-year-old nephew after his mother died due to gross negligence by a hospital in Texas. The young man's mid-30's mother went in for a routine hysterectomy. Evidently, something went desperately wrong in the recovery room. Every nurse on the floor was in a meeting. Every nurse. She essentially bled out and died. Alone.

You'd think my friend's family would clean up, wouldn't you? Uh, no. This happened in Texas. There is a $250,000 cap on medical damages in Texas. The attorney fees would take so much out of the damage award that their family was advised to forget it. The young man has nothing. The grandparents are now assuming the cost of raising another child as well.

How would your co-worker feel if he were left alone with kids and NO second income? How about how he'd feel if there was an egregious medical error committed against someone in his family, and no hope of any ability to go after those who committed the error in court?

Julie

[LSK]

10. thats the thing about freepers, nothing bad can happen to them

Its always someone else.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

13. The 250K limit is only on the pain/suffering part of the award. The other

parts are not included in the cap.

Let's take lost income. Let's say someone worked and made 50K a year and died due to medical or hospital negligence, and would have been expected to have a 15-20 year work career beyond where they died. Then, including inflation etc. they'd be able to sue for a million or more on top of the 250K for pain and suffering just based on lost income.

Then there are other areas like loss of consort (award due to the fact of lost companionship to spouse) etc. etc.

So to say the whole award is capped at 250K isn't quite accurate.

It's controversial but the idea behind the pain and suffering cap was to prevent arbitrary awards of 30 million or whatever the jury felt like in a given case, where they varied wildly, were huge, and the size of the award often bore no correlation to the damage done in a given case.

Not trying to argue the merits of the 250K cap with you, just trying to correct a misconception.

[Missy Vixen]

18. If the attorney fees will eat up the $250K

one's rolling the dice to come out ahead with any cash at all.

>So to say the whole award is capped at 250K isn't quite accurate.<

It's accurate for those who don't have unlimited resources and the ability to burn cash in court for many years waiting for a payout that may never come.

Julie

[Czolgosz]

34. You are wrong about the $250K cap. It's not just pain and suffering, it

caps all noneconomic damage which includes much more than just pain and suffering, including things such as disfigurement and physical impairment (e.g., if you are are a retired person, a stay-at-home mother, a child too young to have income potential, or any other person without a loss of income and you are horribly and painfully brutalized by medical negligence and also your nose is mistakenly cut off and also you lose both arms and both legs due to erroneous amputations, then you have no "pecuniary" losses of your own income and the $250K is the cap on your recovery of pain and suffering, as well as your loss due to your hideous disfigurement, plus your loss of physical capacity as a result of the amputations). You are mistaken about loss of consortium -- it IS also included under the $250K cap.

You are also wrong, by the way, about boosting your loss of income "including inflation." You are awarded only the present value of these lost wages.

Finally, your understanding of the way economic damages works is incorrect. There is a legal concept called "subrogation." Under this concept, if you are receiving disability benefits (say from workers compensation), then the economic damages awarded to you for loss of income reimburse the workers compensation carrier, they do not reimburse the injured person until the payee of the benefits gets reimbursed first. Similarly, if you have a million dollars in medical expenses, it is true that this million dollars in medical expenses is not part of the cap, but then that million dollar award is not for the injured person's benefit because, under the concept of subrogation, the payee of your medical treatment (whether it's your insurance or Medicare or whomever) recovers those economic damages.

Generally speaking, the part of the damages that are capped at $250K are the part that is divided up to pay the lawyer, to pay the medical experts, and -- if there is any left over -- to compensate the injured person. Unless you can pay the lawyer a hourly fee, you will have to pay on a contingency basis which typically comprises 40% of the recovery (so there goes $100,000 of your $250K), and there are extremely burdensome and expensive expert requirements in medical negligence cases which generally drive the cost of bringing such a lawsuit to about $80,000 to over $150,000.

In summary, the $250K cap generally limits the actual recovery for most victims of medical negligence to somewhere between $0 and $70,000. That's IF you can get a lawyer to take your case, which -- generally speaking -- you can't. Under the caps, patients are well and truly fucked.

I AM arguing the merits of the 250K cap with you, while I correct several critical misconceptions.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

42. I stand corrected. You are right. However 250K still does not represent

an overall ceiling on the entire suit, just the noneconomic damages, which are in fact assed as a total under the 250K as you stated.

http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/txconst/sections/cn000300-006600.html

[Czolgosz]

46. The law treats rich people better than poor people because economic losses

are not capped. So if someone commits life-altering medical negligence on, say, Dick Cheney, he still has a valuable claim because his capped noneconomic damages will only be a small part of his uncapped economic damages so the overall damages make his suit economically feasible. If the exact same physical damage is done to a stay-at-home mom based on the exact same type of medical negligence, she generally doesn't have an economically feasible claim because her recovery (which will be noneconomic in nature because he has no lost income) will be capped in a manner that there will likely be little of no recovery after the experts and lawyers are paid.

That's unfair, unjust and un-American.

[gratuitous]

12. Often in error, never in doubt

I'm thinking mandatory forehead tattoos for some folks.

[Lex]

35. Exactly right.

"Often in error, never in doubt"

:rofl:

[Czolgosz]

37. (SORRY, MISLOCATED POST) Here is a GREAT article on "tort reform"

It's sadly ironic that several of the people who were fucked in this article actually voted for "tort reform," see "Hurt? Injured? Need a Lawyer? Too Bad!": <http://www.hobb.org/hobbv2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=575&Itemid=159>

[Nikki Stone 1]

15. YAY! Bravo!

Way to stop the ignorant in their tracks!

[Richardo]

19. HAHAHAHA!

:rofl:
By jove I think she's got it!

[FuzzySlippers]

21. Umm....ain't it some kind of furrin cake?

:shrug:

[Liberal In Texas]

25. Somebody here called it TORTE reform a few weeks ago. LOL...n/t

[Yollam]

22. LOL

Brilliant reTORT.

Hehe.

[jane_pippin]

24. Ha! Nicely done. n/t

[salin]

26. then why haven't medical costs fallen - or at least stopped

climbing? Didn't congress pass a law with limits on malpractice awards (and lawyer fees.) Oh ya... that was never the cause for escalating health costs.

[MountainLaurel]

30. That is frickin' fabulous.

:rofl:

[porphyrian]

31. Anyone for tort reform deserves to be the victim of malpractice. - n/t

[Egalitariat]

36. My version of "Tort Reform"

Class Action Attorney's fees must be paid in the same currency their class receives.

If a class action attorney sells out its class in a suit against Blockbuster Video, and every class member gets a $5 coupon for video rental and the attorney's fees are $3.5 million -- then the attorneys should get 700,000 coupons and no cash.

[Czolgosz]

40. That is the law in some places. How do you pay the lawyer who forces

an industrial polluter to remediate the pollution from a neighborhood that has been wrongfully contaminated? How about the lawyer who forces a car company to recall a defective vehicle and replace the dangerous part? Surely, there are abuses of the "coupon settlement" class action, but how do we police that practice without throwing out the baby with the bath water?

[Czolgosz]

39. Here is a GREAT article on "tort reform" and how we are royally fucked

It's sadly ironic that several of the people who were fucked in this article actually voted for "tort reform," see "Hurt? Injured? Need a Lawyer? Too Bad!": <http://www.hobb.org/hobbv2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=575&Itemid=159>

[BlooInBloo]

41. I consider the following to be basic reading on the subject....

http://www.citizen.org/congress/civjus/medmal/articles.cfm?ID=8778

In a nutshell: medmal tort reform is a complete scam. Any problem that exists would be virtually wiped out if doctors would be willing to police themselves responsibly, and insurance companies behaved responsibly.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

45. This is a very good article, but one of the things it reveals, IMO, is not

just the negatives of the 250K cap in noneconomic damages, but also how the system as a whole is not a good one for plaintiffs: lawyers will simply not take a case if the potential damages are not high enough. It's not "cost effective". This was true even before the 250K cap, the cap just makes it apply to more cases.

Let's say you suffer a clear cut injury from a medical procedure where you wind up with 50K worth of damages after missed work, extra medical care, etc. It's often hard to get lawyers to take a case like this even if it has merit, so "small amount" injuries like this often result in no compensation to the patient even when the facility or doctor is at fault.

This is why some have proposed a "no fault" mechanism, especially to cover such "smaller" events, that doesn't involve an adversarial court system and demonizing doctors and nurses for every mishap. Certainly there are times when shoddy care results in grievous injury and the patients should have recourse. But there are also times where people suffer bad outcomes due to the culmination of a serious disease process, or sometimes just bad luck, that result in people seeking damages through a system of legal battle where victory often involves demonizing the well meaning caregivers.

I will fully agree that there is a problem with medicine in that doctors as a group do a pretty poor job have policing their own. Having said that, I feel the malpractice system as a whole that we have in the U.S. is pretty screwed up, "tort reform" or not, and should be seriously retooled or redesigned from the bottom up.

[Czolgosz]

47. I agree we need to do something different. If we had universal government

medical care, there would be little legal grounds for a right of financial rederss for medical errors because of the traditional bars against suing the government. The loss of a legal remedy for medical negligence would at least be balanced by universal access to health care. If we had a fair social welfare net to take care of people whose lives have been ruined by medical negligence, such people wouldn't have a great a need to seek financial justice from the people who were directly responsible for the harm (we could shift the burden for such care from the responsible parties to society as a whole).

In the capitalist/individual responsibility model our legal system is based on, people generally only have a legal remedy if (1) they can afford to pay a lawyer on a hourly basis or (2) their claims are financially valuable enough to merit a lawyer advancing all the high costs of litigation and bearing the chance of winning versus the risk of losing in exchange for a portion of the recovery contingent upon the outcome of the case. That's not a particularly justice-oriented model, but there aren't many better models available.

[pinto]

43. I think the Republican culture of victimization is undermining

the strengths of our country.

[mitchum]

44. Point and laugh at him tomorrow

Show those idiots no mercy

[VolcanoJen]

48. LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL

That's just... well, gorgeous.

"Define a tort."

Beautiful. Simple. Elegant. Funny as shit. :-)

[Sgent]

49. I'm not sure what the answer is

but the current system is bad for both the plantiffs and the defendents.

Small dollar amount plantiffs have no recourse, and no ability to seek it.

Too many defendents are sued for:
1) Things they had nothing to do with
2) Things which they should have been protected from
3) Frivilous claims

I'm not suggesting that "loser pays" or the like is a good alternative -- its not. That being said, perhaps tightening laws regarding defendents, long-arm statutes, and the like is needed. In addition, at least in my area, judges need to start enforcing some laws on the books. Finally, I would like to see sanctions applied in egregarious situations.

Anyone who thinks that a defendent getting thier case dismissed after a trial and appeal, or 20k of legal fees, is a just outcome, needs to reexamine the real world.