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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Srexley who wrote (548949)	3/8/2004 12:57:14 AM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

I agree that the huge judgements, (not settlements), can be extreme. This occurs when juries get a look at "business as usual" among billion dollar companies that are stonewalling people that paid for coverage and have no where to turn. It's amazing how mad juries can get when they look at deliberate actions of insurance companies that, for instance, withhold payment for life saving medical care that they know they owe. When the person suffers greatly or dies as a result, juries often award huge punitive damages awards. The insurance company then floods the news outlets and its mailings to its insureds with "poor me, I've got to raise rates to pay for this." The problem is that most of the time those huge awards are drastically reduced on post trial motions or on appeal. The truth is, however, that the rest of us could certainly make a good argument that our insurance costs should go down if the amounts paid in settlements, judgements and for insurance company legal fees went down. Of course if we did away with the right to recover ANY AMOUNT from the person or company responsible for the injury, we wouldn't even need liability insurance. It would be good for business too. Who do you think that would benefit; people like you and I who might be injured on the one hand, or the people who sell bad products, commit malpractice in medicine, law, brokering, accounting, etc., or those who commit unlawful acts under the auspices of the police power, or.....on the other---- or maybe, on the third hand, those of us who are paying more than our fair share of government and would now be required to cover the food and medical costs of those injured by the fault of some third party? It's not an easy question to analyze and those that try to put the "blame" for our rising insurance costs on trial attorneys and victims of the negligence of others, seek far to simplistic and erroneous a solution. If you're really interested consider these facts: More money is spent on attorney's fees to DEFEND personal injury cases than the victim's attorneys make in contingency fees for representing the injured. When they talk about all the money that goes to attorneys the insurance company doesn't tell you that the lion's share of it goes to THEIR attorneys, do they? ANY attorney that tries to make a living filing frivolous lawsuits on a contingency basis, goes broke so fast it would make your head spin. Insurance litigation people are experts at evaluating the merits of cases. They KNOW which ones they ought to settle and which ones they can use to make a statement and they aren't afraid to make that statement--see above fact. Insurance companies have their own "public relations" spinners that are on the lookout for extreme cases and issue press releases whenever they can find one. It makes it look like they happen all the time but, in fact, they are rare. Most of the "bad results" are so spun that if you knew the real facts you wouldn't recognize the case. It's a billions of dollar a year business and their "associations" know the value of spin. Most insurance companies that decry the "jury abuses" they claim they suffer, WILL NEVER WAIVE A JURY. Why is that? The truth is that juries are brainwashed to think that the system is a big ripoff that's costing THEM money and they are anti-victim. There are many more bad results that penalize deserving victims than there are that penalize insurance companies. Together with the huge profits and overcharges we get for slow, inefficient and inequitable insurance coverage these factors are little known or unknown to those that think they are paying more to insurance companies because the big bad victims and their attorneys have hypnotized American juries all over this land. We need to wake up and attack all aspects of the problem. The sooner we see through the insurance company fiction, the sooner we can stop wasting our money that supports their inefficiency and lavish profits.