FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 5, 2005

Media contact: Paul R. Lyon, Executive Director

CJA: Bush’s real agenda

is legal immunity for big business

   A victims’ rights advocacy group in Northeastern Pennsylvania today blasted President Bush for misleading the public into believing there is a lawsuit problem in America in order to make insurance companies even richer and eliminate accountability for corporations that recklessly endanger the public by putting unsafe products on the market.

   CJA issued its criticism of the president after he launched his national “tort reform” initiative during a speech today in Madison County, Illinois.

   “President Bush and his political supporters in America’s boardrooms are using doctors’ problems with liability insurance as a way to go after what they really want – allowing corporations to put profits ahead of people’s rights and public safety,” said Paul R. Lyon, Executive Director of The Committee for Justice for All, a nonprofit advocacy group fighting to preserve the integrity of the civil justice system and the Constitutional right of all Americans to trial by a jury of their peers.

   “The president and members of his administration have made it quite clear that they want caps in ALL lawsuits, not just malpractice cases,” Lyon said. “If President Bush has his way, toxic polluters will be able to dump in your back yard and manufacturers will be able to sell products that could kill your kids – all without fear of being punished in a court of law.”

   A provision in the medical malpractice caps bill proposed by Bush – a provision that would eliminate punitive damages against makers of dangerous drugs – “belies the true agenda of Bush’s ‘tort reform’ agenda – immunity for reckless corporate behavior,” according to Lyon.

   He said the case of Vioxx exposed “serious deficiencies” in the Food and Drug Administration’s review process for new drugs, and further underscored the essential regulatory role provided by the civil courts.

   “If our regulatory agencies aren’t doing their jobs, and big corporations don’t have to worry about punitive jury awards, what is to stop them from putting the interests of their shareholders ahead of innocent consumers?” Lyon asked. “Without the threat of court judgments, big corporations will simply calculate what it would cost to do the right thing versus what it would cost for pay for the death and destruction caused by their reckless behavior and make a business decision, much like Ford did in the Pinto case.”

   Lyon said limits on jury awards violate Americans’ Constitutional right to have a jury of their peers decide what’s fair.

   “President Bush had no problem trusting juries to send people to death row when he was governor of Texas. Why can’t those same juries be trusted to award fair and reasonable compensation in personal injury cases?” he asked.

   Lyon said caps also discriminate against children, housewives, the elderly, minorities, the poor and others with low economic damages.

   “Why should the life of a surgeon be worth more than a child or mother?” he asked.

   Lyon added that caps won’t lower doctors’ insurance costs – rates are 16 percent higher in states with caps – and won’t do anything to lower Americans’ health-care costs because malpractice accounts for less than 2 percent of U.S. health-care spending.

   Bush can lower the cost of liability insurance for health-care providers by regulating the insurance industry and eliminating preventable medical errors, which kill as many as 195,000 patients a year in U.S. hospitals – the third-leading cause of death in America behind cancer and heart disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

   As for the number of lawsuits being filed in the U.S., Lyon said, the president likes to use bogus statistics developed by the insurance industry and right-wing think tanks, but here’s what statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice show:

• The number of lawsuits businesses file against each other is 10 times the number tort (personal injury) claims filed by individual consumers for defective products and medical malpractice.
• According to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, tort actions in the U.S. District Courts dropped by 28 percent from 2002 to 2003.
• Over the past five years, federal civil filings have not only decreased 8 percent, but the percentage of civil filings that are personal injury cases has also declined to a mere 18 percent.
• The Bureau of Justice Statistics, a division of the Department of Justice, performed a study of civil trials in state courts and found that the number of civil trials dropped by 47 percent between 1992 and 2001.
• The number of tort cases decreased 32 percent during the same period.
• The trend in award size was also down. The median inflation-adjusted award in all tort cases dropped 56 percent between 1992 and 2001 to $28,000.

“The American people need to wake up and realize that it’s not their doctors who are on the endangered species list – it’s their rights,” Lyon said.