Today thanks to tort reform they are fairer for business. Ordinary people are out of luck. Alvin made no complaint as Carla Jean pointed out those doctors had saved his life. But then in Alvin got some lab tests with disturbing results. He d been having kidney stones and now his prostate specific antigen test showed an elevated score. His family doctor was worried enough to send him to a urologist and that is when the trouble started. Don t worry Alvin recalls the doctor telling him. Kidney stones can elevate your PSA. It was up again to from . He called his urologist who a little more brusquely told him not to worry. But Alvin couldn t stop worrying. In November he got it checked again now his level was . Then he got all excited Alvin says of his doctor who immediately ordered a biopsy. Right away the doctor put him on daily medication and a injection three times a year. The money wasn t a big problem Alvin had insurance but he couldn t help stewing a! bout his predicament. If he d caught it earlier it wouldn t have been in my bones Alvin says. I ll tell you what upset me so much he says today. Other than that I was in pretty good health. We had a ranch out in the country goats and cattle. He didn t give me the opportunity to make the decision of what to do with my life. Personally Alvin had always been against lawsuits. I think there are too many frivolous lawsuits he says. But you ought to have the right to sue if you ve been wronged. Kelly had good news and bad news. The good news was in her opinion that Alvin had definitely been the victim of malpractice. Is this something you are ready to sign on for she asked. Alvin was surprised that someone who seemed as sharp as Kelly could be so misinformed. I voted for it he said. You voted for it Kelly asked eyeing him levelly. He was proud of it. A cap struck him as more than fair. His soon to be attorney gave him a sad patient smile. Otherwise the cap on no! neconomic damages for a retired person with no income amounted to only . Medical expenses are not subject to the cap. And with the damages capped there was little to no incentive for insurance companies to settle. Once upon a time the purpose of tort law was to make injured people whole. When Alvin Berry heard this news he felt utterly betrayed. I felt the whole thing had been misrepresented he says now. We d voted on something and we really didn t know what the facts were. Alvin decided to go ahead with the suit. Central casting couldn t have done better. Whenever he spoke slowly in soft equitable tones the other men all middle aged listened raptly. As a result we tend not to be engaged. My concern was and is that issues like this need to be engaged by the average person. People didn t understand why their wages were depressed. They didn t understand why their job opportunities were fewer. They didn t understand why the economy was not as robust as it would otherwise be. But outside this cozy scene there are those who would str! ongly disagree. It s almost impossible to go too far when it comes to demonizing lawyers. TLR isn t trying to make sure the justice system favors defendants as its critics have claimed. Mark Lanier fresh from his . They re entrepreneurial everywhere but the legal system. They don t have a clue what it s like to be stepped on by a rich snot. Then in Sylvia sought treatment for the first time and with the help of antidepressants was reborn. She had been vomiting all night and was frightened. He gave Sylvia morphine to help her rest. The next thing Karen knew the nurses were saying her mother could go home. She didn t see how. Sylvia was barely conscious from the drugs. We will help you get her into the car they told her. After that you re on your own. Karen was reassured when her mother chatted a little during the ride. At home she said she d be fine alone she just wanted to sleep. But when Karen got back to her own house and tried to call her mother there was! no answer. She had been there for nine hours too sick to reach the p hone. As soon as Karen helped Sylvia up thick grainy blood started pouring out of her nose and mouth. Sylvia Fuller died before the paramedics could arrive. Two EKGs revealed an irregular heart rate. No one had mentioned either finding to Karen or her mother at the hospital. But she was the only patient in there. One employee had been watching TV Karen had told him. So with his sister David began looking for a lawyer. They saw the first one last December. Trying such cases was simply not cost effective for the lawyer or the client. It s an assault on those who are the most vulnerable one plaintiff s attorney told me. It s almost legal malpractice to take those cases. David contacted about fifteen lawyers and was turned down by all of them. You and your family deserve better from the Texas government. The lawyer suggested that David contact a citizens advocacy group and state officials. So that s what he did. It described Texas s great success in limiting friv! olous lawsuits and reducing medical malpractice rates. Please let us know if we may assist you in the future the letter ended. The letter made him more determined than ever to find a lawyer. So far he s had no luck. If a really mean trial lawyer had a case in the right courtroom he would break you. Insurance companies would settle anything for higher and higher amounts rather than go to a stacked court. Public attitudes in those days were more sympathetic to consumers and injured people than to corporate defendants. billion verdict Jamail had won for Pennzoil against Texaco to stand. Justice for Sale the segment was titled. Corporate America fought back decrying a crisis in litigation. It was in this atmosphere in that Dick Weekley decided he had had enough. They formed Texans for Lawsuit Reform styling themselves as outsiders refusing to go along to get along. Suddenly the trial lawyers weren t laughing anymore. There was a new governor too George W. Bush who! had defeated Ann Richards in by sticking to four issues one of which was tort reform. Lay did not mention Enron s long history of pipeline safety violations. Still there were enough Democrats in high places that TLR didn t get everything it wanted. Of course the punitive damages are not what compensates somebody for their loss says Weekley. It s just pure money. What s this next session gonna do to me Lanier asked. Hey don t worry Perry told him. We ve gone as far as we need to. That of course did not turn out to be accurate. Go ahead and lose the commission if there are going to be problems with the house he said. Because your time will be better spent on someone else. If you screw me I m gonna come back on ya. The salesman for KB one of the nation s largest homebuilders promised that the house would be just fine. So Brian and his fianc e Stephanie signed the contract and thrilled became first time homeowners. They were just two young kids and years old respectively without much education or money to throw around. Porcelain sk! inned Stephanie had finished high school and was looking forward to life as a homemaker and a mom. Brian felt they had bought for their hard earned a piece of the American dream. Dream home and all that. We were so damn excited Stephanie told me. But the trouble started even before they moved in. Groundbreaking was delayed and then construction was erratic. But those were small problems compared with the one that took place on moving day. Brian could pry bricks out of their mortar on exterior walls and shingles flipped up in the wind. Eventually Brian demanded a meeting with KB. He was stressed to the max he wanted KB to buy the house back from him. I don t want to live there anymore he told them. The representative laughed in his face and told him to go ahead. Why you may wonder didn t Brian sue KB Because his contract prohibited him from doing so. It required him to seek binding arbitration instead of redress in the civil courts. I always thought it was your! constitutional right to sue people Brian said. But we couldn t sue K B. Like victims of medical malpractice homeowners have seen their access to the courthouse curtailed. TLR did not endorse or lobby for this bill. Brian didn t want to go to arbitration. He couldn t afford an attorney. Instead he decided to make good on his initial threat In January he launched kbhomesucks. Almost immediately he was swamped with e mails from people claiming to have been harmed by the company. Attached was a copy of a million lawsuit filed against someone else who had tried to take on KB. I took that as a threat Brian told me. Still Brian contacted the lawyer and requested a meeting with KB s director of customer service. For a moment peace appeared to be at hand. But then Brian asked for in moving expenses and for reimbursement of his down payment. KB said it would not exchange any cash with him until the house sold. That was a deal breaker for Brian so as he put it the deal broke. Stephanie had a miscarriage that spring. He had the persistent ! feeling he was being watched. Finally in September Brian sued KB in state court for harassment. Among the claims against Brian was an accusation of cyber squatting for misusing the KB name. The ruling came too late for Brian and Stephanie who by then had let the bank take their house. This is hell on earth that s what it is Stephanie said. THE YEARS BETWEEN and were frustrating for TLR. Its candidate Dale Wainwright won. The lesson was that you didn t cross TLR. Support from plaintiff s lawyers is a campaign issue Trabulsi told me solemnly. But by TLR s years in the wilderness were over. Once a plaintiff s paradise the court in and was finding for plaintiffs in only percent of its cases. Once the lobbyist was dispatched the TMA s new leadership refused to engage with the trial lawyers at all. Nixon curtly informed the TTLA that there was a new sheriff in town and things went downhill from there. The concern was the train was going so fast no one could stop it M! ark Lanier told me. Their pleas for exceptions to the cap fell on dea f ears. What about nursing home patients who were injured Nope. What if the doctor was proven to be drunk Still no. TLR spokesman Hoagland told me with barely contained outrage My guys were there for civic virtue. We are not divorced from the legislative process. The House passed the bill . Plaintiff s lawyers front all expenses and get reimbursed and paid a fee only if the client wins. He also included language that allowed the cap to be stretched to and even in rare situations. It was a piecemeal dismantling and sale of our civil justice system. They called the law a speculative experiment to determine whether liability insurance rates will decrease. But by that Democratic court and the Democratic Texas it operated in was long gone. Trabulsi suggested that no one in his right mind would take that possibility seriously but retired U. As of June polls showed that percent of Texans favored letting legislators limit lawsuits with just percent opposed. Twenty years! of lawyer bashing had taken its toll. In the past Hankinson had supported needed tort reform and continues to do so and accepted TLR contributions. Meanwhile special interest groups had gained unprecedented control of the Legislature. This tort reform went too far she told me. I don t consider this to be reform. I view this as something that deprives people of their constitutional rights. One group was missing in action trial lawyers. To make this program work we must vow to not communicate with the public. NO LAWYERS NO EXCEPTIONS. Within weeks the arguments about court access began to have an effect. Particularly troubling were advertisements in print and on television that put the cap for noneconomic damages at . If we d had another week we could have cleaned their clock Hankinson told me. senator Sam Brownback of Kansas was just leaving as I arrived. They brought back the small aircraft industry Brownback assured me. After he left I asked the quartet what! exactly they had done in Kansas. Ah nothing one of the members said. He was speaking generically about tort reform. It might seem that after the sweeping reforms there is little left for TLR to do. Ashley s father Xavier a corrections officer also suffered some brain damage and needed plastic surgery. P Operating Partners the owners of the convenience store. The decision was based on anti drunk driving laws passed years before the change in proportionate liability. The assertion that legislators didn t know what they were saying he says was sophistry. There are other areas of the law that TLR would like to see reformed. According to its latest press kit the group is intent on upgrading the qualifications required to serve on juries. And we believe sometimes that doesn t happen. Several recent studies on the other hand make you wonder whether there was ever a litigation crisis at all. They studied resolved malpractice claims from to relying on data from the Texas Department of Insurance. Furthermore malpractice claims made up less ! than one percent of total health care expenditures in Texas. In short nothing changed much in fourteen years except that insurance company profits doubled. And the promised results of tort reform have not occurred Malpractice insurance reductions have been less than . percent since and the hoped for return of doctors to underserved areas has not taken place. The institute found in fact that the number of lawsuits in the U. actually dropped percent in the decade prior to the tort reform year of . But as so often is the case in politics the wronged side overreached. And lose Mark Lanier adds. Maybe that s the point. Brian Zaltsberg for one is going down fighting. As soon as he finishes college he plans to attend law school. Lions for Lambs For most of us it s a day to d.
Source: bayareacitizensagainstlawsuitabuse.blogspot.com/2007/11/lions-for-lambs-for-most-of-us-its-day.html
Another site recomended to review: furasat04 ( http://furasat04.blogsome.com/ )
Nothin g seems worth thinking about, but that's how it is. My mind is like a complete blank, but I don't care. Not that it matters.
Feel free to read: eettuu15 ( http://eettuu15.blogspot.com/ )
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment