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May 30, 2006
Doctors or Lawyers?
Posted by Van Helsing at May 30, 2006 1:55 PM
The Bronx civil jury is the greatest tool of wealth redistribution since the Red Army.—Left-wing litigator Ron Kuby
While it's great for trial lawyers like the Breck Girl that they are so easily able to convert their cheesy glibness into mountains of cash, the rest of us have to pay for the litigation gravy train — and we pay in many ways, as Deroy Murdock describes on NRO.
When it comes to the lucrative medical malpractice racket, the first to pay are doctors. Between 1975 and 2003, malpractice insurance premiums rose 406%. Unsurprisingly, some of this outrageous expense is passed along to us, contributing heavily to the 525% rise in the cost of medical care over the same period.
Another cost is in quality of care, as doctors are forced to practice "defensive medicine," by which the objective is not the health of the patient, but to avoid giving ambulance chasers anything they can twist into malpractice. Defensive medicine often entails unnecessary tests and trips to specialists, and avoidance of any drugs targeted by looters.
John Edwards and his colleagues have no trouble shopping around for vindictive juries too dim to understand that as potential consumers of medical care, they are being looted right along with the doctors. As a result, the figures involved can be stratospheric. Helping to explain why vaccines will be in short supply if a bird flu epidemic ever becomes a reality, one vaccine lawsuit demanded $30 billion in damages. Annual revenues for the entire industry come to $6 billion.
A cost that's hard to gauge is the price we pay in valuable drugs that are not on the market because in this legal climate, it's not worth it to keep them there. When Glaxo was forced to withdraw LYMErix, Lyme disease infections shot up 40%. When Merrell Dow had to pull Bendectin, morning sickness hospitalizations doubled.
As U.S. Chamber of Commerce chairman Tom Donahue puts it:
The trial lawyers look at the pharmaceutical guys the way Willie Sutton looked at banks: That's where the money is.
It's bad enough when the need to finance lawyers' lavish lifestyles results in outrageously expensive, substandard medical care and the unavailability of useful drugs. What's worse is that it can result in no medical care at all. John Edwards isn't the only one to sue people into the ground for delivering babies. As a result, seven counties in New York have no OB/GYNs. Hospitals in poor neighborhoods, like Methodist Hospital in South Philadelphia, have been forced to stop delivering babies.
In the end, we have to chose: who does more for us, doctors or trial lawyers? Remember the answer when you go to the polls in November. The reason the tort system doesn't get fixed is that the 56,000-member Association of Trial Lawyers of America gives the Democratic Party $millions to block any attempt at reform.
