Ian, your post mirrors my experience in part. I don't see, however, how you get from "Oklahoma, due to the efforts of a strict medical licensing authority and juries with good sense, had largely been spared the onslaught of the malpractice mess until recently; now it is here in full force," to your implication that "tort reform" is the answer to the problems.
What happened in Oklahoma to create the "malpractice mess?" Were there some catastrophic cases that were too great for the risk pool to handle? With responsible Oklahoma juries I would think that any large awards would have been justified by both the liability and the damage facts. Or was it some convergence of factors such as mismanagement through inadequate allocation of loss reserves that eventually caught up with the fund? Was too much of the fund used up in "management fees" or inefficient hiring and employment? Something happened and I don't believe that Oklahoma citizens became the overnight friends of plaintiffs and their attorneys.
Clearly the malpractice crisis is "multifactorial" and one of the factors is based on the fact that the law requires that actual victims be compensated by those who negligently cause them harm. That's based on our long history of requiring that those who cause harm through negligence pay the cost of the harm. The fact is that real people sometimes suffer horrible damages from the practice of negligent medicine, and although it is a "cost of doing business" that certainly doesn't mean that we should make the victims pay the cost of malpractice by denying them fair damages for losses which they never would have suffered if they had received competent treatment.
This is especially true since the "tort reform" states which place more and more of the damage burden on the victims seem to be having the same sharp rise in premiums, the same reduction in carriers and the same "malpractice crisis" that "tort reform" supposedly alleviates.
I'm all for getting rid of frivolous lawsuits, I'm all for finding ways to reduce attorney's fees on both the plaintiff and the insurance defense side by regulation or by requiring arbitration or special panels that reduce the time and cost of claims, I'm all for assuring fairness in the proceedings, I'm all for a more stringent review proceeding to get rid of the small percentage of bad medical practicioners who cause much of the major negligence damage, I'm all for a comprehensive look into the (so far) private books of most insurance companies, I'm all for more vigorous investigation of oligopolistic practices that are, or were until recently, legal for most insurance companies in most states, and I'm all for insurance and tort reform.
But I'm not blind to the fact that while the common whipping children of the insurance industry are the "trial lawyers, their greedy clients and irresponsible juries," those factors constitute the tip of the iceberg of an out of control industry that, unfortunately, may be the most powerful industry in this country. |
