Posted on 03/28/2005 10:18:37 AM PST by MikeEdwards
I suspect most Americans think that the $368 billion penalty extracted from the tobacco industry was inherently unfair. They sell a product that is legal. State governments benefit from the taxes on the sale of that product. Some States even invest in tobacco companies to benefit their pension funds. People may freely choose to either purchase the product or not. Smokers voluntarily assume the inherent and widely known risk of using that product. The verdict against the industry simply does not pass the smell test.
For years now we have been hearing about outrageous amounts of money being awarded to people who were too stupid to avoid spilling a hot cup of coffee on their lap in a moving car, but a far more insidious penalty is being paid by everyone as the result of the 20,000,000 civil lawsuits annually filed in America. That’s right; twenty million!
A new book, The Lawsuit Lottery: The Hijacking of Justice in America, by Douglass S. Lodmell and Benjamin R. Lodmell ($15.95, World Connection Publishing, Phoenix, Arizona) is so astonishing that, were it not for its careful documentation, one would read it in a complete state of disbelief. "In less than 50 years," write the brothers Lodmell, "these increasingly powerful litigators transformed the lackluster tort business into more than a $200 billion a year industry. By the end of the 20th century, the litigating public was filing as many as 150 lawsuits every minute of every working day–with a take-home pay for plaintiffs’ lawyers approaching $45 billion a year in 2002."
The key word here is "public." This lawsuit industry would not exist if it were not for clients seeking to be paid for everything they thought was wrong with their lives and was presumed to be someone else’s fault. . . . .
(Excerpt) Read more at canadafreepress.com ...
If you want to know why the costs of healthcare have gone out of sight, you can again look at the insanity of civil lawsuits. "At $1.55 trillion in 2002," write the Lodmell brothers, "the annual cost of healthcare in America leaped by 9.3% to about $5,400 per man, woman and child. That’s 14.9% of the U.S. economy." By 1999, 40% of physicians had been sued and 25% of them had been sued more than once.
By 2002, the figure had climbed to 58%! By then, the average jury award for medical malpractice had tripled to $3.5 million–three times the average jury award for all torts combined! Little wonder insurance companies elected to stop insuring physicians or required premiums so high the practice of medicine was no longer possible. And in some parts of the nation people with real health problems often found they were unable to find a doctor to treat them.
Will Shakespeare had it right when he said "First we kill the Lawyers"
I'm reading the book "Blink" (Malcolm ?) and he has a section where he says that medical lawsuits are not based on medical issues, but can be predicted based solely on how the medical professional treats his patient when talking to them.
The book is fascinating, but I'll diverge from it a bit to simply say that a way of looking at this is that the lawyers know to go after doctors who will be unsympathetic to juries, because they can get big money (that is NOT a point made in the book, which in this case is about why the patients would want to sue).
"I suspect most Americans think that the $368 billion penalty extracted from the tobacco industry was inherently unfair."
Unfortunately, the author might be wrong. Indiana has been considering an NYC-style smoking ban for some time now, so I've asked my co-workers what they think about it.
The vast majority of people I talk to say something along the lines of: "I have the right to go out to a restaurant and not smell smoke. We need to ban smoking."
Scary!
Do you even have the slightest idea of the context of that quote?
That is sad.. What is ever sadder is that the same people would like to have the Government kept out of there lives. I don't like cigarette smoke, however, I'm not going to tell a business that they will be a non-smoking establishment. If I don't like it, I'll go elsewhere. Plain and simple.
So, you advocate chaos and tyranny?
We seem to be getting more and more tyranny from the courts/lawyers/judiciary just fine right now, thank you very much.
Or from using the quote grossly out of context, I guess...
One third of all humans who practice law on earth, practice it in the United States of America.
One only need remember, that lawyers do not create any wealth. In America, they are primarily a destructive force. Nobody calls a lawyer when things are going just fine. (The odd M&A specialist excepted.) Lawyers get their greatest benefits from problems and disasters. It is often in their interest to keep two parties quarreling for as long and lucratively as possible. Misery, discord and pain keep the fees flowing, after all.
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