Comments on: John Steele Gordon in Hillsdale “Imprimis”

By: Riiiiight

Riiiiight — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 23:58:58 +0000

Nice non sequitur.
I’ll agree that universal health insurance could reduce lawsuits and judgement values, but the seeds for our sue-happy society were sown in the last century when people learned that one could sue and win (or settle) for almost any indignity that life presents.

By: DEM

DEM — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 14:34:38 +0000

Hugo that is quite a stretch. If you were right, then obviously insured plaintiffs would have a hard time recovering medical bills even in the most obvious cases of negligence. Moreover, your theory cannot account for what is often the largest component of tort damages: pain and suffering.

By: Hugo S. Cunningham

Hugo S. Cunningham — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 23:49:24 +0000

If the newly independent United States had kept the English “loser pays” rule, American juries would happily have nullified the claims of British creditors and soaked them with the hometown deadbeat defendant’s legal costs to boot.

“Loser pays” is not a cure for unreasonable expectations of jurors and judges. If drawn up carefully, however, it can encourage both sides to settle, rather than gamble on “outlier” verdicts after expensive trials.

The principal cancer underlying America’s metastasizing lawsuit culture is our lack of universal health insurance. Lawsuits serve as our (inefficient and unfair) substitute. American juries will find against even an obviously innocent defendant, if they believe he has insurance and the needy plaintiff does not. In contrast, European juries and judges know that the plaintiff’s medical bills will be covered in any case.

By: DEM

DEM — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 16:16:38 +0000

For every malpractice case filed in 1960, for instance, 300 are filed today.

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Very interesting. I thought the point of tort law was to incentivize everyone to be more careful, and thus to avoid causing injuries. The explosion of med mal filings over such a long period can only mean one of two things: tort law is simply ineffective at incentivizing the use of reasonable care, or lawyers are filing scores of claims where there is no negligence. Which is it?