From the American Association for Justice press release.

The National Law Journal lists some of the cases highlighted by the Chamber, noting that the organization “released the list on Dec. 29, and attempts to reach representatives of that organization or of the American Association for Justice, which represents the plaintiffs’ bar, were unsuccessful during the long holiday weekend.” However, the article was later updated to include the AAJ statement issued through Ms. Widmann.

In his “Y’Think?” blog in the Fayetteville Observer, Gene Smith took similar issue with the Chamber’s list, noting that “there’s no mention of the disposition of those cases” that are listed, and that some have already been dismissed while others have not yet reached a preliminary hearing. Smith also points out that “there’s not a bankruptcy on the list — not even an itty-bitty fine,” which is important “because (A) The Top Ten were posted by the chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform, a title that implies a need for a fix, and (B) the Institute’s annual roll call ‘helps to remind us that abusive lawsuits affect real people and real businesses, and can have harmful results to lives, jobs, and even our economic growth.’” No abuse is illustrated in the list, Smith contends.

From the American Association of Justice press release.

A new study produced by consumer and public-interest groups claims insurance companies create periodic crises to drive up profits.

The Americans for Insurance Reform study says these crises, where coverage becomes unaffordable or unavailable, are known as “hard markets,” sending premiums sky-high. Authors of the study further claim the insurance industry uses these supposedly manufactured crises to support their calls for “tort reform” – asking legislators for new laws making it more difficult to sue.

Sound familiar? North Carolina’s General Assembly passed legislation this year restricting the ability of people who claim they have been injured to seek compensation through the courts.

The report, titled “Repeat Offenders: How the Insurance Industry Manufactures Crises and Harms America,” also concludes the country has been in a soft market since 2006, with rates stable and dropping in every state. Now, according to the report, some in the insurance industry are using Hurricane Irene to justify jacking up rates, even though the storm wasn’t as bad as predicted.

Fighting for Justice is your resource for the latest news and information about America’s civil justice system.

As the world’s largest trial bar, the American Association for Justice (formerly known as the Association of Trial Lawyers of America) works to make sure people have a fair chance to receive justice through the legal system when they are injured by the negligence or misconduct of others—even when it means taking on the most powerful corporations. Learn more at www.justice.org.

Seinfeld mocked it. Letterman ranked it in his top ten list. And more than fifteen years later, its infamy continues. Everyone knows the McDonald’s coffee case. It has been routinely cited as an example of how citizens have taken advantage of America’s legal system, but is that a fair rendition of the facts?Hot Coffee reveals what really happened to Stella Liebeck, the Albuquerque woman who spilled coffee on herself and sued McDonald’s, while exploring how and why the case garnered so much media attention, who funded the effort and to what end. After seeing this film, you will decide who really profited from spilling hot coffee.

Presidio County is bigger than Delaware and has just one practicing physician who doesn’t deliver babies or treat emergencies. It’s the kind of underserved region that Gov. Rick Perry suggested would benefit when he proposed a crackdown on medical malpractice lawsuits in 2003.

Now running for president, Perry says his tort reform plan proved the wisdom of his business-friendly policies by expanding health care across the state.

Yet none of the 23,000 doctors Perry says Texas has newly licensed have come this way.

“Some patients, when they find out they’re pregnant, bam — they’re out of here,” said Dr. Darrell Parsons, whose practice in Presidio is just across the Rio Grande from Ojinaga, Mexico.

An analysis of Perry’s tort reform initiative in Texas reveals a more complicated bottom line than his campaign rhetoric on the issue would suggest. State medical data show that the number of physicians practicing in Texas has increased since the initiative passed in 2003, though by considerably less than the total Perry cites. And the bulk of that influx has come in larger cities where health care was already abundant, leaving large rural swaths of Texas still without doctors.

Discussing his malpractice reforms in a speech in Georgia in September, Perry said, “Pregnant women have better access to OB-GYNs. People in need of trauma care have better access to neurosurgeons and other specialists. That’s what tort reform is really all about. About how to give better access to the people of my home state. We need to spread lawsuit reform across all economic sectors of this country.”

However, medical records in Texas show that of the state’s 254 counties, only 106 have an obstetrician/gynecologist — just six more than in 2003. In Presidio County, which has 8,000 residents and is growing, some of Parsons’ patients move 240 miles away to live with relatives in Odessa or Midland when they become pregnant.

Overall, the increase in physicians in Texas roughly tracked the state’s population growth. Medical rolls increased by 24 percent since 2003, while Texas’ population was soaring by 20 percent during the decade. Texas also saw rapid growth of physicians per capita before tort reform, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.

The statistic Perry most often cites — 23,000 newly licensed doctors after tort reform — includes about 10,000 who sought licenses in Texas but took jobs elsewhere and physicians practicing telemedicine in other states.

Perry made access to health care a major argument for tort reform in the initiative’s advertising campaign in 2003, saying the state was hemorrhaging doctors because of lawsuits and malpractice insurance costs. The ballot issue, Proposition 12, became the most expensive campaign ever waged to amend the Texas Constitution. More than $15 million was spent in the showdown between trial lawyers and health care interests.

In a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation that year, Perry told a New York audience how three out of five Texas counties lacked an obstetrician.

“That’s a hardship for many pregnant women in certain areas of our state, but especially women with high-risk pregnancies,” Perry said.

Eight years later, that ratio is the same.

On Wednesday, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) addressed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its Institute for Legal Reform — the leading front group for multinational corporations seeking to limit Americans’ access to the courts.

And in its typical self-serving fashion, ILR has seized on the hardships of millions of unemployed Americans, claiming that this country needs “jobs, not lawsuits,” despite no actual evidence to bolster its nonsensical claims.

ILR’s board members run the gamut of industries — from chemical makers and drug companies to Wall Street banks. And they have more in common than just their commitment to closing the courthouse door on injured Americans. The corporations that finance ILR have long, storied histories of using the courts for their own agendas — to gain the upper hand against their competitors, customers and even each other.

One ILR board member, Caterpillar Inc., sued the Walt Disney Co. because it felt the depiction of bulldozers in the straight-to-video movie “George of the Jungle 2” was overly villainous. FedEx Corp., another stalwart board member, took a “stand for justice” by suing a man for making a chair out of FedEx boxes. Johnson & Johnson used the civil justice system to take on a most unlikely foe — the Red Cross.

These corporations certainly have the right to seek justice through the legal system. What makes their actions shameful is that they are members of ILR’s board for the sole purpose of denying American workers and consumers that very same right. This ultimate hypocrisy not only undermines that ridiculous jobs argument but also highlights their real motivations: obtaining immunity when they injure or kill American workers and consumers.

Every company that holds a seat on ILR’s board or participates as a member stands to gain monetarily from the organization’s agenda of blocking the courthouse doors. For instance, in return for being an ILR board member, Honeywell International has received lobbying and public relations help when its negligence has been uncovered. Days after an Illinois jury delivered a multimillion-dollar verdict against Honeywell for conspiring to hide the dangers of asbestos, the Madison County Record, an Illinois-based propaganda-as-news outlet fully owned by ILR, featured an opinion piece headlined, “McLean County Continues Inching Closer to Becoming a ‘Judicial Hellhole.’”

America’s civil justice system gives people a fair chance to hold wrongdoers accountable. The civil justice system has uncovered countless examples of corporate negligence, and as a result, things we take for granted — whether it is cars, medicines or the workplace — are all safer. Our legal system also serves as a powerful deterrent, making corporations think twice before putting profits ahead of people. Thousands of lives are saved because the civil justice system gives corporations the needed incentive to make better products, instead of ones that are cheaper but more dangerous.

When faced with abusive corporate practices, the courts are often the last resort for everyday Americans to seek justice. ILR board members know a jury verdict is one of the few things they cannot buy and control, but with ILR’s assistance, they have found a willing partner to simply whine to Congress for more immunity instead.

We cannot allow self-serving corporations — let alone their front groups — to just slap a “jobs creation” sticker on legislation that has absolutely nothing to do with jobs, in order to finally check off items on their wish list. There is a difference between providing incentives to employers to hire more workers and giving handouts to corporations that simply want to skirt the law and avoid accountability. While we doubt the chamber will ever learn the difference, we certainly hope lawmakers will.

The purpose of the 1991 law was to remove claimants’ lawyers from the comp system and force the claimants to deal directly with the insurance carriers and their army of lawyers. The law was extraordinarily successful in achieving this goal. I know, because I am one of the lawyers who was kicked out of the system. According to a report generated by the State of Texas shortly before the law was passed, I was ranked number 13 on the list of claimants’ lawyers handling a high volume of workers’ compensation claims. My partner at the time was ranked slightly lower on the list. But after 1991 neither of us ever handled a single case under the revised law.

Please read this article. You will be amazed at what the Texas Legislature and the Supreme Court have done to Texas employees. Here are the opening paragraphs:

As Deputy Sheriff Ed Martin sat by his squad car in a fast-growing pool of his own blood, he called his wife and woke her at 3:30 a.m. He knew he might die from the point-blank shotgun blast that greeted him moments earlier when he knocked on a door for a 911 call in a tiny east Texas town called China.

“It’s pretty bad and I don’t know how it’s gonna turn out,” Martin told his wife as he awaited a helicopter medical evacuation. “Get the kids and meet me at the hospital.”

When they arrived, Martin was on a gurney and covered with a white sheet splotched red. His wife clutched their sleepy 2-year-old daughter to her chest as their sons, 6 and 10, stood at her side.

“I know it was tough for them,” Martin says, retelling the story of that night in June 2006 in the flat monotone of cop-speak. “But I wasn’t sure if I’d make it through surgery and I wanted to at least tell them ‘Hello’ and ‘I love you.’ ”

Doctors say Martin’s life was saved by his ballistic vest and the swift trip to the hospital in Beaumont, near the Gulf Coast and the Louisiana border. But the blast vaporized the skin of his inner arm down to bare muscle and tendons, and tore out the main artery.

A couple of weeks later, Martin got a phone call from an insurance adjuster handling his workers’ compensation claim. He was told the $7,300 helicopter ride was “not medically necessary” and likely would not be covered.

“Not medically necessary,” Martin says, repeating the phrase twice in succession five years after the shooting. “That was my first introduction to those words. And I’ve heard them a lot since then.”

While cops can’t be sure what lurks behind a door on an emergency call, they know the hazards. But Martin could not have foreseen the traps and trauma in store for him as he entered a state workers’ compensation system that was radically overhauled 20 years ago expressly to drive out lawyers representing injured workers, and that has grown ever friendlier to the insurance industry.

Martin, 45, has undergone 11 surgeries to repair his various injuries. He was away from work for two years. Such treatment is built in progressive stages, many of which—like his helicopter evacuation—were initially denied by the insurer and only later approved.

The chain of repeated denials of treatment not only kept him from recovering sooner but also left him with deep, nerve-enveloping scars that today cause sharp tingles he says feel like ants constantly biting his hand.

From the American Association for Justice:

America’s civil justice system gives people have a fair chance to receive justice through the legal system when they are injured by the negligence or misconduct of others – even when it means taking on the most powerful corporations.

This is more important now than ever because the drug and oil industries, big insurance companies and other large corporations dominate our political process – and thus, people cannot depend on the political system to hold corporations accountable.  When corporations and their CEOs act irresponsibly by delaying or refusing to pay fair and just insurance claims, producing unsafe products, polluting our environment or swindling their employees and shareholders, the last resort for Americans to hold them accountable is in our courts.

Because of the civil justice system, our cars are safer, environment is cleaner, and medicine is safer.  Click below to see everyday examples of why we need a strong civil justice system, and its role in protecting American workers, consumers, and families.

The Environment

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REPORT: HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH »

Dangerous Toys

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REPORT: PLAYING WITH SAFETY »

Auto Safety

SEE THE FULL SIZE IMAGE »

REPORT: DRIVEN TO SAFETY »

Seniors

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REPORT: STANDING UP FOR SENIORS »

Health Care

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LEARN MORE: PROTECTING PATIENTS »

The Fort Worth Star Telegram writes that the “report shows that healthcare costs and insurance premiums have continued to rise in Texas even more than the national average since the state’s tort reform legislation, and that the number of uninsured Texans has continued to climb.” Still the report did find “that medical malpractice insurance premiums as well as payments have plummeted.” The “Healthwatch” blog of The Hill also covers this story.

In continuing coverage, Fierce Healthcare reports, “Despite popular belief, placing medical liability caps on states may not curb healthcare costs, according to yesterday’s report by advocacy group Public Citizen.” The report calls the caps “‘a failed experiment,” and noted that in 2003, Texas established “a $250,000 cap on the amount of damages that injured patients could recover from negligent doctors.” However, “since the state implemented tort reform, Texas hasn’t contained spending as intended, but instead saw increases in Medicare spending.” Taylor Lincoln, the report author, said, “Health care in Texas has become more expensive and less accessible since the state’s malpractice caps took effect.”

From the American Association for Justice news release.