Congratulations to the Center for Justice & Democracy
Today I got a wonderful e-mail from Joanne Doroshow, the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Justice & Democracy. Joanne is on my short-list of heroes, so I’m extremely pleased to share the following news with you:
CJ&D’s blog, ThePopTort, has for the second year in a row been selected as one of the 100 best legal blawgs by the American Bar Association. You can help turn that good news to great news by voting for The PopTort in its individual category. First, register here (it’s quick and free.) Second, simply click here and vote for it. I’ll wait patiently while you go register and vote for it. This is a big honor for the CJ&D, as there is a lot of competition to be in the top 100 legal blawgs by the ABA.
The CJ&D has also launched its own Facebook page, with lots of great photos including some hilarious scenes outside its window in Lower Manhattan. You may already be a Facebook fan of ThePopTort, but now CJ&D has a page, too. Why not become a Facebook fan of both ThePopTort and the CJ&D today?
You can also start following Joanne’s excellent blog posts at the Huffington Post.
Again, hearty congratulations are in order to Joanne and the fine crew at the Center for Justice & Democracy. They’re one of the finest organizations fighting to protect the civil justice system from the millionaires & billionaires behind the tort “reform” movement.
California Appellate Court Holds That Defendants Are Liable For The Full Cost of Medical Care
This is a major victory for the civil justice system in California.
A prevailing plaintiff should be entitled to recover the full cost of her medical care, even if her private insurer paid a smaller, negotiated amount to cover all of her hospital and doctor bills, California’s 4th District Court of Appeal panel held Monday.
The decision overturns a San Diego County Superior Court ruling that cut plaintiff Rebecca Howell’s jury award for medical expenses from $189,978 to $59,691 on the grounds that she should only recover the amount her insurer, PacifiCare, paid to settle her bills, not the initial amount her medical providers charged. Howell suffered severe neck injuries when the driver of a Hamilton Meats & Provisions truck made an illegal U-turn and struck her car.
Under California’s collateral source rule, "Howell, as a person who has invested insurance premiums to assure her medical care, should receive the benefits of her thrift; and Hamilton, as the party liable for Howell’s injuries, should not garner the benefits of Howell’s providence," Justice Gilbert Nares wrote for the unanimous three-justice panel.
What’s going to be very interesting to watch is how healthcare reform affects this decision (if at all). Under California law, this decision doesn’t apply to anyone who has government-provided health insurance, but instead applies only to those with private insurance. Would an individual who takes “the public option” (if it’s offered) not be able to recover the full cost of medical care? Or if we’re all required to buy private insurance, will the rationale of this case go away?
Judge Rules That The Government Failed To Properly Maintain New Orleans Waterways
This case shows everything that is right about America; our citizens are able to hold the government accountable both at the ballot box, and in the court room. It must seem crazy to citizens of other countries that we can do so. It seems crazy to me to live any other way.
“It is the court’s opinion that the negligence of the corps, in this instance by failing to maintain the MR-GO properly, was not policy, but insouciance, myopia and shortsightedness,” wrote Judge Stanwood R. Duval Jr. of Federal District Court.
…
The plaintiffs’ lawyers argued that the Army Corps had not exercised “due care” in its maintenance of the channel, and that the maintenance that was done, like dredging, only made things worse. The corps’ actions, they said, brought salt water into the New Orleans area, killing off marshes; eroded the banks on which levees sat; and more than doubled the channel in width, giving water driven by hurricanes an unobstructed path to the city.
In his decision, Judge Duval largely agreed with this argument, at least as it pertained to St. Bernard and the Lower Ninth Ward. He was highly critical of the government, which had argued that the hurricane and its massive storm surge was simply more than the system had been designed to handle, and said the corps had manipulated facts.
There Were Only 17 State Court Jury Trials In Hawaii Last Year
Not per week, per month, or per day. In the entire year. Seventeen.
The “vanishing trial” is resulting in less courtroom experience for Hawaii’s litigators as parties on both sides of legal disputes seek faster and cheaper ways to resolve their differences.
Only 17 civil jury trials were completed in the state’s circuit courts in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2008, according to the most recent data available from the Hawaii Judiciary.
Award Reduction Shows Our Justice System Works Just Fine As It Is
I don’t know the underlying facts of this case well enough to opine as to whether $800,000 was in fact too much money. But the fact that a judge slashed the award from $800,000 to $265,000 shows that we don’t need anymore tort reform:
LAKELAND | A federal judge Thursday cut $535,000 from the $800,000 GEICO was ordered to pay a former employee from Lakeland whom the company fired in August 2004 for refusing orders to dismiss an older worker.
U.S. District Court Judge James Moody ruled the insurance giant should pay $265,000 to Marija Stone, a former GEICO unit manager, her lawyer, Peter Helwig, said.
The ruling overturns a Sept. 21 federal jury’s finding for Stone that included $100,000 in back pay, $200,000 in damages for emotional distress and $500,000 in punitive damages.
Moody ruled Stone was not entitled to punitive damages because the jury essentially doubled her award for back pay, Helwig said.
Judges can and do reduce jury verdicts they find to be excessive. Because judges have and exercise this power, you can’t argue for tort reform solely because you believe juries are too likely to inflate damage awards. Such an argument necessarily implicates judges for failing to reduce jury awards. This power is known as remittitur.
If you didn’t know, most judges don’t have the power to increase jury awards they find to be too low.
Doctors have been flocking to the area and surrounding Westchester County since the 1970s, drawn in part by an upper-class clientele who demand top-notch medical care and have the means to pay for it. The county has one of the highest median household incomes in the nation (about $77,000 a year in 2007), and the figures soar above six digits in suburbs like Scarsdale and Chappaqua, which former President Bill Clinton calls home.
Nearly 3,000 miles away, scaring up a doctor in Bakersfield, situated in California’s economically battered Central Valley, is a lot harder. In fact, White Plains has more than twice the number of doctors per capita as Bakersfield, where needy patients until recently had to take a 2-hour bus trip to Fresno to see a diabetes treatment specialist.
Two decades worth of U.S. healthcare data analyzed by Dartmouth Medical School at Reuters’ request shows that such regional disparities are increasingly creating a nation of health-care haves and have nots.
The research also suggests that the chasm between places like White Plains and Bakersfield is likely to grow — a point underscored by dozens of interviews with doctors and experts. That’s because physicians, the data shows, gravitate toward affluent locales in the United States that already have all the medical help they need.
Now, California has damage caps on medical malpractice caps, and New York does not. Ceteris Paribus, any city in California should have more doctors per capita than any city in New York. But we don’t live in a world of Ceteris Paribus. Ask a doctor if they’d rather practice in White Plains, where everyone has health insurance and the doctor risks being sued, or if they’d rather practice in the California central valley (or any other poor, uninsured area) and be completely immune to malpractice lawsuits. Most doctors are going to pick White Plains because money matters.
Without Medical Malpractice Lawsuits, Connecticut Hospitals Would Rarely Be Held Accountable
Are there any states that aggressively investigate and fine hospitals for violation of state law?
For the fraction of cases the department pursues, investigators almost always find multiple violations of state laws and regulations. But hospitals rarely face sanctions.
From 2005 through September 2009, the department conducted nearly 300 investigations based on adverse-event reports, with deficiencies found in all but a handful of cases. But during the same period, the department imposed cash fines against hospitals fewer than 25 times. Most of the fines ranged from $8,000 to $25,000, with two high-profile exceptions in 2005: a $250,000 penalty against Connecticut Children’s Medical Center and a $100,000 fine against Hartford Hospital — both after multiple deaths or serious injuries.
More Proof That We Can’t Trust Businesses To Protect Their Workers
Can you spot the most disturbing sentence in this clip?
WASHINGTON — Some employers are pressuring workers not to report illnesses and injuries, just one problem that has led to widespread underreporting of workplace safety issues, according to congressional investigators.
Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspectors often didn’t interview workers to verify what employers claim when keeping tabs on accident and illness rates, the Government Accountability Office report released Monday states.
The report said workplace injuries and illnesses went unreported because companies pressured employees to withhold the information, and about a third of health providers said they were pressured to withhold medical treatment so companies could avoid filing reports with OSHA.
It’s the last half of the last sentence: “about a third of health providers said they were pressured to withhold medical treatment so companies could avoid filing reports with OSHA.”
What kind of a boss asks medical staff not to treat an injured worker so the boss won’t have to report the injury to OSHA?
Uninsured patients are twice as likely to die from trauma than those with insurance
I found this very interesting.
Patients who lack health insurance are more likely to die from car accidents and other traumatic injuries than people who belong to a health plan — even though emergency rooms are required to care for all comers regardless of ability to pay, according to a study published today. An analysis of 687,091 patients who visited trauma centers nationwide from 2002 to 2006 found that the odds of dying from injuries were almost twice as high for the uninsured than for patients with private insurance, researchers reported in Archives of Surgery.
TortDeform.com, the Civil Justice Defense Blog, confronts and transcends the arguments put forth by the tort "reform" movement, working to ensure that all Americans can access the courts.
