There are some serious problems with the health care system in the United States, and in a speech in North Carolina’s Piedmont Triad, President Bush took aim at trial lawyers as one of the big ones. It was a waste of ammunition, a blatant political ploy and an attempt to shift at least part of the health care debate away from issues the president and his Republican Party apparently don’t like to face.
Trial lawyers who sometimes win large malpractice suits or judgments aren’t the problem with health care, and the president knows it. One of them, however, is a possible opponent of the president’s in 2004 — North Carolina’s Senator Edwards. But the real problem in the president’s remarks in a High Point speech was not that he took an indirect dig at Edwards, but that Bush and his congressional allies continue to dodge solutions to major hardships for working families when it comes to health care.
Rules ensuring prescription drug coverage for the poor and the elderly are disgracefully inadequate; health insurance premiums are going through the roof; Republicans in general have hardly been in the forefront of protecting patients’ rights; there are millions of uninsured people in this country; long-term care is an emerging crisis for baby boomers and their families, yet the president has shown little leadership.
The insurance industry, of course, has been a reliable GOP supporter. And even if Bush wanted to agree to vast improvements in health care, he is handcuffed by his ill-advised tax cut package. Or perhaps he and his party simply hope that the American people aren’t paying attention to domestic issues these days.
Whatever his reasons, the president engaged in some molehill-to-mountain rhetoric designed to divert attention from real health-care issues and focus it instead on trial lawyers and malpractice suits.
He could not change the fact that in North Carolina, just 21 of the 200-plus malpractice suits that ended last year in judgments, jury awards or settlements were in the multimillion-dollar category. Besides, there are safeguards built into the system: Many such cases are decided by juries, by fair-minded citizens doing their duty. And judges sometimes reduce jury awards they deem excessive. It is not as if a trial lawyer can just file suit one day and clean out an insurance company’s bank account the next.
Are there disreputable trial lawyers? Most certainly — there are such people in all professions. Are there mistakes made by juries? Sure, jurors are human. The system is not perfect, but the president’s proposal to put new limits on pain and suffering damages, shorten the time limits on filing a malpractice suit and make other changes would only render the system more imperfect. And though Bush would like to keep trial lawyers — who do receive a big cut of judgments or settlements — in the bull’s-eye, the fact is that the real beneficiaries of successful malpractice suits are the people, the families, who have been damaged by negligence. It is they who stand to suffer most under President Bush’s so-called reforms.
