But it should be high on the radar. It not only affects R & D, but has a devastating affect on our whole healthcare industry as well, contributing to skyrocketing healthcare and insurance costs due to frivolous lawsuits.
The biggest obstacle to real tort reform is that the trial lawyers, a wealthy special interest group, has the Democratic Party in their pocket (and, ahem, some Republicans).
"You can have affordable health care and a good environment for jobs. Or you can have rich trial lawyers filing frivolous lawsuits. Not both." ~~ Newt Gingrich
"Last year, U.S. corporations spent more money on tort claims than they did on R&D. If innovation is the key to our long term leadership, then some tort lawyers are cashing out our country's future....tort lawyers are ok with state reform, but not national reform. You know what state level tort reform means - it means that as long as there is one lawsuit-friendly state, they can sue almost any major, deep-pocketed company in America. No thanks, America needs national tort reform." ~~ Mitt Romney
http://www.freerepublic.com/~unmarkedpackage/#spending
"The current system of litigation is too expensive for America, fails to provide justice for Americans and is being made steadily worse and more expensive by increasingly predatory trial lawyers who have more and more resources devoted to gaming the system to enrich themselves at the expense of individual Americans and American society. This is especially true in the healthcare system. Doctors are more important to our nation's health care system than trial lawyers. In order to ensure the availability of doctors it is important to create and/or maintain hard caps on non-economic damages in medical liability cases." ~~Newt Gingrich
http://www.senatorfredsmith.com/content/Pages/show/id/12
ooops, affect an effect
I was especially fond of the comment that someone made during the “hillary-care” days when she had a team of lawyers working on a government health care plan.
“I’ll accept lawyers’ ideas about health care if we let the doctors develop a plan for tort reform.”