Protect Your Rights: Tort Reform Myths Continue To Be Exposed

Published By Michael Lovins on 

Tort reform does not seem to be living up to its billing in Texas. We were promised more doctors and lower health care costs as a result of placing caps on damages in medical malpractice suits. As a recent article points out, none of these promises have come to pass:

One of the more optimistic predictions was that doctors would simply stampede to Texas in order to set up practice thanks to Governor Perry’s legal protections. But the latest info from the American Association of Medical Colleges has Texas ranking 42nd in the country in doctors per 100,000 people. If Texas is such a safe haven for doctors, then surely they can do better than that – 202 doctors per 100,000 people is a significantly lower ratio of practicing physicians than Rhode Island (ranked 4th), Vermont (ranked 6th), Connecticut (ranked 5th), and New Hampshire (ranked 11th) Each of these states have much lower populations and, interestingly enough, no limits whatsoever on non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases.

Also torpedoed by the facts is the notion that tort reform causes health insurance premiums to drop. Between 2003 and 2010 the average price of a health insurance premium for an individual in Texas went up 46 percent, and the average price of a family health insurance plan in Texas went up 52 percent. As if that wasn’t enough of a sign that tort reform hasn’t helped make health care cheaper, Texas had one of the highest rates of uninsured people in the country in 2010. Thirty three percent of Texans between the ages of 19 and 64 had no health insurance, and 17 percent of Texans between the ages of just-got-here to 18 weren’t covered either. Dallas, 33.1 percent, no coverage. Houston, 30 percent, nothing. San Antonio, 22.4 percent, nada. Seven years of caps on non-economic damages had no positive effect on either the costs of health insurance or the number of people who could afford it.

This article also does a great job of pointing out the flawed logic behind claims that plaintiff’s attorneys are out there flooding our courts with “frivilous lawsuits”:
If the case in unsuccessful, the attorney gets nothing and has lost the money that he spent getting your case through court. The idea that any sane attorney would gamble willy-nilly with his own money to pursue a frivolous lawsuit is absurd. You will never hear a plaintiff’s attorney who works on a contingency basis say ‘Sure, why not? Let’s just throw it out there and see what happens.”