Stephanie Mencimer says no, but I suspect wishful thinking. The only tv ad I saw in a close Senate race that raised the liability reform issue was Bob Corker’s ad raising Harold Ford’s multiple votes against malpractice reform—and Corker was the only Republican Senate candidate that won a close race.
ATLA sure doesn’t seem to think that liability reform is a good issue for it: none of the television ads it bought mentioned the subject.
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It’s got legs because voters and lawsuit-filers are divergent groups. Most anyone in America would say that “lawsuits are out of control” or that there are too many frivolous cases. Everyone knows the McDonald’s coffee case. They see concrete examples of overlawyering in their daily lives. They work hard, obey the rules and suck up the occasional ding of life without resorting to a lawsuit. But they pay high insurance rates and can’t go swimming by the pier.
A campaign ad that demonstrated the cost of lawsuits to the average voter with stats and a colorful example – and the candidate’s willingness to stop it – would probably resonate.
Here in Pennsylvania, physicians of all major advocacy and specialty groups supported Sen. Rick Santorum, who has been a champion for medical liability reform.
Some physicians professed to being horrified by Santorum’s social and “values” positions and swung the other way….but Rick was endorsed by every organization which made an endorsement in the race for US Senate.
Because of his consistent and vocal support for reducing lawsuit abuse, ATLA and other lawyers proclaimed Santorum their number one target in the 2006 election, and to back up their proclamation donated $2.5 million to his (sadly) victorious opponent Bob Casey, Jr.
While Santorum campaigned relentlessly on this issue, Casey said little, except to deny that there WAS a medical liability crisis, quoting the ATLA playbook word for word when he couldn’t escape commenting.
In this particular case, advocating for liability reform was fatal for Rick Santorum – but to his credit, he never wavered on the topic or his strong belief that our highly dysfunctional system needs serious revamping….
I suspect that members of the medical professional who couldn’t bring themselves to support Santorum because of social issues that don’t really impact medicine at all will someday come to regret PA’s choice of junior senators….although I also suspect that Casey will never have the opportunity to vote “NO” on a liability reform bill because the new Senate Judiciary chair will never allow such a bill out of committee…
ATLA didn’t kill Rick Santorum – “gay marriage”, man-on-dog love, and Terry Shiavo did. Right or wrong, Santorum became a clown in the public discourse.
Personally, I think for most people tort reform is a snoozer. Even if they buy claims about a “lawsuit crisis” or a “litigious culture”, they believe there are bigger and more important things to worry about right now.
More people than just doctors and lawyers vote, and for most of those, tort reform did not register as a high priority in the polls.