Sun Beginning to Shine Through Tort Reform Lies
Like most of the county, Nevada bent to popular opinion by enacting a $350,000 cap on pain and suffering in 2004. To accomplish massive restrictions on negligence liability, insurance companies aired television ads of doctors walking out of town along the highway, fleeing from high malpractice insurance costs.
A congressional study and a national consumer advocacy group found at the time that the health care industry had spent millions of dollars exaggerating the malpractice crisis in Nevada and elsewhere in the country. Doctors overall weren’t actually leaving Nevada at a high rate. But the commercials, helped persuade voters to approve an industry-backed ballot initiative imposing a $350,000 cap on pain and suffering.
But the insurance industry didn’t bother to consider that minimizing their risk on claim payouts would lead to increased negligence. In Nevada, a Doctor is being sued for implementing cost-cutting strategies in his now closed endoscopy clinic that allegedly endangered the lives of his patients. Injured victims have claimed the Doctor re-used syringes without sanitizing them, and in many cases exposed his patients to Hepatitis C.
AB495 was recently introduced in the Nevada General Assembly. The bill seeks to eliminate the $350,000 cap. The measure also would increase the time limit for bringing a malpractice case to trial after it is filed. Instead of having two years, plaintiffs would have up to five years to get to trial.
Proponents of the bill state that the Hepatitis C outbreak has opened the eyes of the general public to the realities of tort reform. Damage caps have become vehicles that limit insurance company payouts without consideration of whether higher payments are justified based on negligence. As the public begins to see the lack of accountability in the medical profession created by damage caps they are beginning to wonder why they agreed to limit pain and suffering to $350,000 in the first place.
As more and more Americans realize how tort reform will impact their lives if they are injured, we are beginning to see judicial and legislative challenges to damage caps. While fancy television commercials can influence the public, the truth always shines through. In this case, the people of Nevada are beginning to think about how Doctors conduct themselves, not whether they are leaving because of insurance costs. Hopefully, it won’t take a hepatitis outbreak or other heath catastrophe for Missourians to realize how the insurance company cheated them into agreeing to limit pain and suffering damages to $350,000.
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Also see my other posts on tort reform myths:
Tort Reform: What’s Really Going On
Tort Reform Myths: Doctors Are Leaving
Tort Reform Myths: Jury Awards Are Out of Control
Tort Reform Myths: Greedy Attorneys File Frivolous Lawsuits
