Collin County personal injury attorney Richard Armstrong blames “tort reform” for lack of success of legitimate injury claims.
In the six years since Proposition 12 amended the Texas Constitution to place “caps” on medical negligence and related claims, the backwash has regrettably barred many legitimate personal injury negligence victims from the courthouse. This goes for even egregious, heart-wrenching cases like the rape by a nursing home employee of an 85 year old female Altzheimer’s patient. See, e.g., “Look Who’s Behind Tort Reform“, Dan Zegart, The Nation, October 24, 2004 [http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1006-22.htm]. This is particularly distressing, because it is not an isolated circumstance. Whole swaths of claims that used to be recoverable—or at the very least “settlable,” have been swept up in the tort reform bathtub and thrown out with the baby. This means that if your grandmother or grandfather was dropped by a nurse’s aid who wasn’t trained when and how to lift, and subsequently dies, there is not a whole lot you can do about it. The same thing, Armstrong notes, applies to bed sores, a common problem in substandard nursing homes who don’t turn their patients frequently as good practice requires. Such failures often lead to serious staph or related infections which can cause serious illness or death with alarming speed. But with the advent of “tort reform”, such negligent practitioners have little or no incentive to clean things up.
“For those Texans who didn’t consider it an important issue at the time,” says Armstrong, “perhaps they will realize just how far-reaching it was the next time they are facing the loss of a loved one. No one,” Armstrong continued, “should have to first, bear such heart- break, then second, be slapped in the face by a system that has deprived them of any legal remedy. ”
Armstrong notes that, as is often the case was complex issues, certain interest groups stood to gain economically from beating the tort reform drum, and did so by pouring millions into the fight to suppress the precious right to a trial.To quote Zegart, above: “Malpractice ‘reforms’ are only the thin end of the wedge for a much bigger agenda. Lined up behind the doctors are most of the Fortune 500, a formidable coalition led by insurance and tobacco companies, far-right think tanks and dozens of well-heeled pressure groups, many of them fronts for corporate interests.”
Tort reform may have receded into the background politically, but not to the thousands whom it has harmed. This one cannot be chalked up to the law of unintended consequences. It was very much intended in every way. One can only hope that the current administration in Washington, whatever you may think about it in other respects, will be more Plaintiff-friendly, and that it will have an effect in Texas.
Armstrong the Law Firm is a Collin County Personal Injury Attorney practice with nearly thirty years of experience in handling personal injury litigation. It also practices in the business and commercial litigation arena.