Tag: tort reform

NYT (!) to Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D) (!!): enough with the asbestos scam (!!!!!).

That is what they called it. Admittedly, in an Op-Ed, but wow.

In May, Carolyn McCarthy, a nine-term congresswoman from Long Island, was diagnosed with lung cancer. Her treatment began almost immediately, causing her to take a lengthy absence from her office while she fought the disease. At the same time, McCarthy, 69, ended a pack-a-day cigarette habit that she’d had for most of her life, presumably because she understood the link between cigarette-smoking and lung cancer. Scientists estimate that smoking plays a role in 90 percent of lung cancer deaths.

“Since my diagnosis with lung cancer,” she wrote in a recent legal filing, “I have had mental and emotional distress and inconvenience. I am fearful of death.” She added, “My asbestos-related condition has disrupted my life, limiting me in my everyday activities and interfering with living a normal life.”

Asbestos-related?

Continue reading NYT (!) to Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D) (!!): enough with the asbestos scam (!!!!!).

Nancy Pelosi’s non-tort reform.

Jen Rubin:

Remember Obama’s effort to try a “test” for tort reform? (We don’t actually need a test, since it has worked to lower medical malpractice coverage and help increase access to doctors in states that have tried it.) Well, Pelosi’s bill has an anti-tort-reform measure. On pages 1431-1433 of the 1990 spellbinder, there is a financial incentive for states to try “alternative medical liability laws.” But look — you don’t get the incentive if you have a law that would “limit attorneys’ fees or impose caps on damages.”

See Hot Air for more, including a link to the actual language and a reminder that the Democrats never had any intention of doing anything at all to disconcert trial lawyers.  Which is the point that I’d like to hammer home, here: there is no reason to be surprised at this.  We knew back in August that something like this was going to happen; and this is precisely the sort of political doubletalk that the people opposing the Democrats’ health care rationing bill have come to expect from the current ruling party.

So.  To any random Democrats reading this: when Nancy Pelosi looks you in the eye and tells you that the new health care bill addresses tort reform, she is lying to you.  Because she thinks that you are stupid.

She. Thinks. That. You. Are. Stupid.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

CBO: Tort reform would save $164B over ten years.

54 billion in deficit reduction, 110 billion in reduced health care costs. Via the CBO’s blog, via Hot Air.

That’s a decent amount of savings, there: it’s a shame that the Democratic party would rather that trial lawyers got the money. After all, trial lawyers can be counted on to give the Democrats some of it.

Crossposted to RedState.

Bill Bradley wants to trade tort reform for the public option.

Good luck with that.

The best that I can say about the former Senator’s plan is that he means well:

Whenever Congress undertakes large-scale reform, there are times when disaster appears certain — only to be averted at the last minute by the good sense of its sometimes unfairly maligned members. What now appears in Washington as a special-interest scrum could well become a triumph for the general interest. But for that to happen, the two parties must strike a grand bargain on universal coverage and malpractice tort reform.

It’s also unfortunately the worst that I can say, too. Democrats in Congress had their opportunity to seek a bargain, and they deliberately spurned it. Since then, they have libeled, slandered, lied, and schemed against not only Republican legislators (which is part of the game), but the American people (which is not). And now they are poised to try to pervert the rules of the Senate itself in order to pass corrupt legislation that ignores the concerns of… pretty much everybody in the country who isn’t a major contributor for the Democratic party, really.

So no deal.  If this distresses former Senator Bradley, then he should have spoken up before this: say, at the beginning, when Madame Speaker and Reid decided to freeze out the GOP.  But it’s so easy to go along to get along when things are coming along well for your party…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Howard Dean: No tort reform for fear of trial lawyers.

You know, this admission may have justified the entire town hall thing, right there:

Here’s the quote:

“This is the answer from a doctor and a politician. Here’s why tort reform is not in the bill. When you go to pass a really enormous bill like that, the more stuff you put in it, the more enemies you make, right? And the reason that tort reform is not in the bill is because the people who wrote it did not want to take on the trial lawyers in addition to everyone else they were taking on. And that is the plain and simple truth.”

Not that Dean’s being completely truthful: the various health care rationing bills share a distressing lack of taking anybody on. And he neglected to mention that the problem wasn’t so much ‘taking on’ the trial lawyers as it was ‘losing the money‘ from them. But this is still more truth than we’ve grown accustomed to from a Democratic politician: no doubt one reason that they packed Dean off to American Samoa right after the election.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Will there be a public option sellout?

Verum Serum wants to know, “Will Obama Really Sellout Liberals and Drop the Public Option?” Off-the-record pushback to the contrary, probably: when it’s been suddenly made clear that your job is to actually convince the American public that the current plan is better than no plan at all, no individual part of a plan is non-negotiable.  The real question is what progressives will do about said sellout.  I predict ‘nothing,’ past the usual whining.  They never do.

And I look forward to writing another post like this when we push the administration into endorsing meaningful tort reform.  Which, as I have noted earlier, is not negotiable.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

‘Public option’ on the table?

(Via Hot Air Headlines) I could be cruel about this, but if it turns out that the title here (“Party leaders prepare liberals to accept a health care reform deal“) is accurate then I see no particular reason to gloat over the fact that the quote-unquote ‘public option’ will be sacrificed for the sake of ‘conservative’ Democrat, Republican, and popular opinion.  We’re all one country and we’re all Americans, after all, so I’d just be glad that we’ll be able to move on from having health care hung up on this particular controversy.  That being said, once we remove the public option from consideration we will have to move on to discussing why on earth we’re talking about revising health care without first discussing the blatantly obvious need for tort reform.

This is not really negotiable, I’m sorry to say.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.