| 05/06/2007 |
| Malpractice lawsuits on the decline |
| Four
years ago, the Scranton area captured national headlines when
President Bush came to town to raise awareness about an epidemic
of “junk lawsuits” and “excessive jury awards” that he
claimed were driving away doctors and making health care unsafe.
Doctors here were threatening to walk off the job and warning
darkly that if state legislators didn’t act soon, women would
be all but relegated to having babies on the kitchen table. Today, of course, we now know that the kitchen tables were spared, doctors by and large stayed put, and that Pennsylvania never really was suffering from a lawsuit epidemic. The latest evidence comes from the state courts themselves, which report that, last year, in the 10 counties of Northeastern Pennsylvania that include Lackawanna and Luzerne, injured patients and their families filed only 166 malpractice lawsuits, down from 272 in 2000. Considering that last year the state’s new patient safety authority collected more than 20,000 reports of serious, fatal or life-threatening medical errors in those same counties, the argument could be made that Pennsylvania suffers from not enough malpractice lawsuits. Why such a disconnect between the hard facts and the sound bites on the legal system? As it turns out, the “malpractice crisis” was a lot more about politics than about policy. The doctors’ protests, here and elsewhere, were carefully crafted, stage-managed events orchestrated by some of the nation’s leading PR pros and backed with funding from corporate America. In fact, in early 2003, doctors in Scranton met with a man named Frank Galitski, a former insurance industry lobbyist and Bush campaign operative. Mr. Galitski was helping the White House coordinate doctor protests as part of its opening attacks on Democratic candidates, most notably former North Carolina senator and trial lawyer John Edwards. Pennsylvania was a critical swing state that Republicans were hoping to win by bashing Democrats as weak on health care and beholden to trial lawyers who specialized in suing doctors. It was a brilliant strategy. Plaintiff lawyers rank second only to unions in making large contributions to Democratic candidates, and in many states they are virtually the only source of campaign funds for progressive candidates. In Pennsylvania, for instance, during the 2004 presidential elections, virtually all the deep-pocketed donors in the state gave to Republicans. Of the top five Pennsylvania political donors identified by the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, only one gave to Democrats: Richard Schiffrin, a Pennsylvania plaintiff attorney who donated $50,000. By comparison, the other four donors gave more than half a million dollars to GOP candidates in the state. The Association of Trial Lawyers of America (now the American Association for Justice) donated almost $200,000 to Democratic state party affiliates in Pennsylvania, making it the third-largest organizational donor in the state, behind John Kerry’s campaign group and a PAC run by Gov. Ed Rendell, both of which also got trial-lawyer money. If the doctors helped pass legislation that cut into the lawyers’ earnings, they would not only get rid of lawsuits but they’d put a big dent in the Democrats’ funding source. The doctors’ protests also proved useful for the Republicans’ corporate backers — the chronic defendants in tobacco, insurance and drug companies that were seeking immunity from lawsuits, too. Voters were far more likely to support physicians looking for legal protections than the makers of Vioxx or the shoddy nursing home operators. The white coats provided good cover for malpractice “relief” legislation that also would have prevented injured consumers and patients from suing drug companies and nursing homes that neglected their charges. (In West Virginia, the doctors’ protests were even underwritten by the coal industry!) In the end, the malpractice “crisis” was simply a diversion. It’s much easier to bash lawyers than to offer genuine solutions to the nation’s bona fide health care crisis, the 43 million uninsured Americans. Yet rather than propose meaningful health care reform, President Bush kicked off the year with a State of the Union address calling for new restrictions on malpractice lawsuits. Several of the GOP’s leading contenders for the White House are already touting their support for legal “reform,” and with former trial lawyer Sen. Edwards in the running for the White House in 2008, odds are good that Scranton hasn’t seen the last of phony lawsuit rhetoric. STEPHANIE MENCIMER is a contributing editor of the Washington Monthly and author of “Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right To Sue.” She will speak on the subject at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the University of Scranton’s Brennan Hall, Room 228. |