PELOSI'S TORT BOMB.

And a Buried Tort Bomb:

A stealth provision that would undermine state damage caps. Article Comments (71).



In his September address to Congress, President Obama made a nod to bipartisanship by acknowledging that excessive litigation "may be" contributing to rising health costs, and he proposed state "demonstration projects" to test medical tort reform. This wasn't much of a concession, but it apparently was still too much for House Democrats, who are using their bill to subvert reform that is already on the books in many states.

Buried in Speaker Nancy Pelosi's 1,990-page bill is a provision that provides "incentive payments" to each state that develops an "alternative medical liability law" that encourages "fair resolution" of disputes and "maintains access to affordable liability insurance." Sounds encouraging. Read on, however, and you come to this nugget: The state only qualifies if its new law "does not limit attorneys' fees or impose caps on damages."

Holy Bill Lerach.

Huge contingency fees and damage awards are the mother's milk of frivolous lawsuits. That's why 30 states have adopted caps on awards as the core of their reform, with huge success. Texas imposed malpractice caps in 2003, and the state has been rewarded with fewer lawsuits, a 50% drop in malpractice premiums, and a flood of new doctors. The House bill is intended to discourage other states from doing the same.

The Pelosi bill also provides these incentives only if states adopt watered-down alternatives to existing malpractice caps. Those alternatives include certificate-of-merit rules, which in theory require lawyers to get medical proof before suing but in practice mean that lawyers recruit and finance "expert" witnesses.

States could also provide "early offer" rules, which are supposed to encourage fair settlement of legitimate claims. But as organizations like the Manhattan Institute have noted, those offers only work if combined with restrictions on lawyer fees and damage awards that reduce the incentive to go for the jackpot judgment.

The Senate bill avoids tort reform entirely, notwithstanding Mr. Obama's showy pledge before a national TV audience.

Never mind that reducing medical lawsuits is a rare reform provision that really would reduce health-care costs. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the savings at $54 billion over a decade. Consulting firm Tillinghast Towers-Perrin has suggested the direct cost of medical tort litigation is more like $30 billion annually. PriceWaterhouseCoopers estimates that last year $240 billion in health expenditures were the result of doctors ordering unnecessary procedures to protect against the risk of lawsuits.

The hidden Pelosi tort bomb is one more example of the stealth radicalism that defines ObamaCare. If it passes in anything like its current form, we are going to be cleaning up the mess for decades to come.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A24. Bold face mine.

This much should be obvious to everyone: when we drive up the cost of covering the populace, we must decrease the amount spent on any one person in the population. So when we divert health care dollars to the trial attorneys we take money away from the providers and recipients of health care. There is not an unlimited amount of money available for health care in our country. Our limit is $2.1 T, or $2,100,000,000,000.00--wow, that's a big number. But so is the number of dollars currently diverted to the fat cats who suck the juice out of the system. Trial lawyers like the presidential candidate John Edwards take directly and indirectly a significant portion of the allowance. Someone goes without care already on account of the Tort Lobby and its owners. Change the system according to the Pelosi Tort Bomb and we will see a really painful diversion of money out of the system of health care. Add more recipients, take away some providers, add government bureaucracy and its inefficiencies (the "employer of last resort"), use the bully pulpit to push chronically ill elderly into Hospice prematurely, fatten the take of the Drug Lobby owners, demoralize the providers in the trenches, and markedly increase the diversion of increasingly scarce monies into the Tort Lobby and its owners. One does not need to be a logician or mathematician to see what is going to happen here. No doomsday predictions, just common sense here.

People will die of the Tort Bomb. John Edwards made a ton of money pulling on the heart strings of jurors, retarded the specialty of obstetrics in America, pushed millions of expectant mothers into the care of midwives, and did not give anyone a red cent worth of care. Multiply John Edwards time thousands and add up the cost of diverting health care dollars to lawyers. And don't think for a minute that these fat cats advance the science or art of caring for the well or the sick. Too many lawyers in government already. Now add to their take by rolling back state legislation limiting fanciful awards for pain and suffering a la John Edwards. This country was born in Liberty and will die in Law. If you have a solution for this one, have at it. I think we have passed a tipping point. Glenn Beck and his group will point such things out, no doubt. But I doubt anyone will change the trajectory of the "debate" at this point.

Cartoon courtesy of the WSJ. It's tough to debate with these people! Got to love Pelosi, Reed, and our President Obama. We voted for change and we are getting it!!