I am amazed at the ignorance of some of the posts that have been made here. Blanket statements about lawyers, about the effects of lawyers, and veiled attacks on the judicial system as a whole.
Every one of the hypocrites who have lashed out against lawyers in this thread would come running, screaming and begging if they, or a family member was injured by a defective product, and the company that manufactured the product knew it was defective, but placed it into the stream of commerce anyway. If you state that you would not want your damages covered, changes to the product made, etc. you are simply hiding behind the internet and posting a lie. So, it comes down to if its your case, lawyers are good. If its not your case, lawyers are bad.
When you buy a house, a lawyer looks at the paperwork. Since the lawyer helps you, that lawyer is good. If the lawyer for the other side puts up an objection, that lawyer is bad.
You use lawyers to your advantage. Because we have an adversarial system, it is very easy to generalize "lawyers are bad" since they are advocating for their cause, which may be against yours.
Finally, with regard to insurance rates rising due to med mal cases. It is HOGWASH! It is untrue, there is no backup for it, there is no support for it, there is no truth to these statements. Rates are rising as a direct result of the decline of investment income, which the insurance companies have used a balancing agent on their books.
According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), costs from
malpractice lawsuits represent less than 2%[3] of the nation's total health
care spending, and the tort reform legislation pushed by President Bush
would reduce health insurance premiums by less than one-half of one
percent.[4] While President Bush has claimed that lawsuits cause "docs to
practice medicine in an expensive way[5] in order to protect themselves in
the courthouse," a study by the Harvard University School of Public Health
"did not find a strong relationship between the threat of litigation and
medical costs." Additionally, a study in the Journal of Health Economics[6]
compared medical costs in states with limits on lawsuits to states without
limits and found only tiny savings - less than three-tenths of one percent.
In all, CBO reported "no statistically significant difference in per capita
health care spending between states with and without limits on malpractice
torts."[7]
the Bush Administration's recently-passed Medicare bill
specifically prohibited Medicare from negotiating lower prescription drug
prices from large pharmaceutical companies
Wow, sounds to me like big insurance and big drugs do not want reform of their systems, and, because lawyers are an easy target, lets use them as a scapegoat.
All tort reform does is take away one means of checks and balances. Society can be kept in check by government regulations....laws and regulations designed for thesafety of the citizens, dealing with products, standards (i.e. drug standards). The other way things can be kept in check is through the civil system, whereby companies, manufacturers, citizens will refrain from doing certain things as a result of the consequences they face. As a result, the judicial system provides the means to encourage people to act in a certain way, i.e. act with regard to the safety of others. When you institute tort reform, you damage one means encouraging people to act in a safe manner. When you take away government control, you limit the other means by which people are encouraged to act safely. With no means to encourage safe practices, and no penalties if safety is not important, injuries occur, and nothing is done to prevent their reoccurrence.
Ask yourselves why companies have safety programs........because it saves money. If there is no threat to a loss of money as a result of an unsafe environment, the saftey propgram would increase costs, and therefore likely be not implemented. Why do you have the bar near your keyboard for your wrists.......because the company does not want to pay the damages if something goes wrong with your wrists. If there was no means to enforce your rights, there would be no consideration to you health and welfare, because it would cost money.
Before you go and blame lawyers for all evils, you should really get your facts straight.
