It’s hard for me to have sympathy for insurers that do business in juriisdictions that are well known to have jruies that typically award higher amounts to plaintiffs. Why? Because they choose to do business there and they charge higher premiums knowing that the verdicts there will be higher.
No one is forcing them to do business in those states. Many insurers pull out of state because of the perception that they get home-jobbed by local judges and juries. It leads to less competition in those states and higher rates. At some point, the rates are high enough where the insurers can make a profit or high enough where consumers realize they need to pull back on generous awards.
This is where the free-market needs to work itself. We don’t need the governmet to step in and make “tort reform” rules. If you want government out of the way and out of your business, then you should not be supporting tort reform.
did you ever hear of the term “redlining”? That is basically what you are proposing, except for liability lines of coverage.
Also, if an insurance company does pick and choose territories as you indicate, can they be accused of “unfair discrimination”? You bet some greedy trial lawyer will sue to force the insurance companies to write in that territory, so his chance at a payday can be even bigger. Sorry – but lawyers are out of control in this country – and what is worse is they are writing all the laws, non attorneys dont stand a chance of getting elected to anything these days. They will never sanction or limit themselves. Congress is a prime example of this – pass Obamacare but make themselves exempt from it.
Philly is a judicial hellhole – why do you think they have more lawyers per capita than any other city?
It’s not redlining if you choose to withdraw from a state. Don’t like doing business in Philadelphia? Withdraw from the state. Safeco did that when I worked there.
Which is why many good doctors no longer practice in southern IL….due to outrageous lawsuit awards, many couldn’t get insurance, so they left the state and now my family has to drive to Missouri for doctor visits. How does this help the tax paying citizens, Obamapoint of view??
When the citizens get tired of having to drive long distances for medical care, they will stop outrageous lawsuit awards in order to encourage doctors to come back. That’s how the free market system works.
My point of view isn’t the Obama point of view. I’m way more liberal than he is. He’s caved in to Republican demands so many times now, his policies are no different than Republican policies. Except when he finally gives them what they want, the move the goalposts even further to the right. Obama’s policies are much further to the right than Eisenhower or even Nixon. Look at it rationally, without emotion and you will have to agree with me on that.
December 21, 2011 at 4:04 pm
GL Guru says:
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OPV, I like your decent and devil’s advocate style, but you are oversimplifying the issue. I don’t have to write insurance to feel the impact. If I avoid Florida, and I do, I still can have a products claim down there. Also, because of forum shopping, I could have a suit in Ill when I chose not to do business in the state. I can’t contemplate that in the rates since they are done at the state level. I agree with your point of not doing business in a state if you don’t like it, but that is just part of the mitigation.
We eliminated venue shopping with regard to Texas medical malpractice cases a while back, and it really helped to improve the legal climate. This was on a state level; it would probably take a Constitutional amemdment to do it on a national level.
Tort reform is just another example of Republican hypocrisy. They say they want to get government out of the way and out of our lives, but they love it when government tells juries how much they can award. Anything to placate their corporate overlords.
It is not republican hypocracy. This is a nonpartisan issue. I do have not issue with a widow and her children getting the money they deserve so they can continue the life they had prior to the loss of dad (mom to be PC), but the Oprah Lottery Juries are irrational in these areas. I have been in NY court watching a juror get up and relieve himself, sit back down and be part of a verdict that was so out of scope of the damages it was sickening. Class action suits are abused by the plaintiffs bar. Thousands of people get coupons when they never realized they were wrong and then law firm gets fees for delivering the notices. There needs to be reason. It is not in crisis but it need to managed better.
It is hypocrisy to say “We want the government out of the way and out of our lives,” like the Republicans have been saying for years and then say that we need the government to put limits on jury awards.
I have no problem with someone saying we need to have tort reform if that’s how they feel (even though I disagree), but when they say that and then say they want government out of our lives it just screams of hypocrisy. What they really mean is that they like regulations that further their cause, but they don’t like regulation that they think hurts their cause.
If they would say that, I wouldn’t say they are hypocrites.
I actually think the word hypocricy is one of the most overused and misunderstood words.
“the act of feigning to be what one is not or to beleive what one does not.”
It is not hypocritical to say one wants limited government involvement and advocate some government intervention. You speak of being a replubicans as unconditionally wanting government out of our lives and they do not purport that. They want reasonable goverment intervention not an absense of it. Same for democrats. Netither agree with reasonable and I am OK with that. At any rate neither side is hypocritical.
So if you are going by the letter of the definition you beleive they are faking. That is a pretty extreme position.
Reminder that socialism, communism and
For the record I am not a republican or democrat. I tend to bug everyone equally.
communism, socialism and fascism are product of the left wing liberals.
December 21, 2011 at 2:30 pm
David says:
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I worked for a med mal carrier in Texas at one point, and we definitely did our best to avoid writing policies in the Rio Grande Valley. Claims frequency and severity, especially for OB/GYN cases, was outrageous compared to elsewhere in the state.
I feel like a squirrel that walked into the no man’s land between the trenches. Nobody can find common ground these days.
Democrats: Everything that is wrong in this country is the Republicans’ fault and the only way to fix it is to follow our plan exactly as written with no changes or addendum.
Republicans: Everything that is wrong with this country is the Democrats’ fault and the only way to fix it is to follow our plan exactly as written with no changes or addendum.
Lawyers: Everything in this country is Big Corporate’s fault and we should sue their pants off in every court in every state.
Big Corporate: Everything in this country is the Lawyers fault and we should eliminate the justice system as we know it
Where the hell did the moderates go? I swear i remember there were some at some point.
George, the moderates got hooked on capital gains and 401(k)’s the same way the old bootleggers are now hooked on crystal meth. Then they bragged about it at their $200 a month “country club” and left themselves no room for retreat. We never realized their souls were for sale. They were.
george, I understand your frustration, but I don’t think it’s accurate. The Democrats in Congress and this administration ahve compromised (and caved in comlpletely) so many times in the past three years it’s really ridiculous. The Republicans haven’t budged an inch and have even moved further to the right every time the democrats give ground.
Just look at last year’s budget battle. Obama and the Democrats proposed 9-10 Billion in cuts but the Republicans demanded $30-35 Billion. By the time the Democrats finally agreed to the $35 Billion figure, the Republican’s demanded $100 Billion.
Democrats have been trying to get a tax increase passed for three years, but Republicans havn’t given an inch.
Yeah, and the republicans will retort with a laundry list of where democrats have not been willing to compromise. I hate both of them. Not enough to vote for Ron Paul…but i’m getting damn close.
Our current mess IS the fault of both Dems and Repubs who continue to promise the moon and the stars to the citizenery. The promise of equal outcomes as opposed to equal opportunity is wrecking our country folks!
The lawyers who make up the vast majority of the population in Congress continue to support the bottom feeding injury lawyers whose ads appear on my TV over 30 times per evening. Yes, I counted.REAL tort reform is needed and it is needed yesterday.
Promising everything to everyone is what killed Greece and is about to wipe out the EU. I like Rick Perry’s suggestion that Congressmen’s jobs be made part time with very low salaries so we can have citizen legislators again. Term limits would help prevent vermin like Ted Kennedy and Barney Frank form corrupting the legislative process for so many decades.
There. I got it out of my system. May I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy and prosperous New Year. Even the lawyers.
It doesn’t matter how high taxes are if people don’t actually pay them.
European nations with far more generous “welfare states” than ours, like Germany, are having to rescue Greece. The problem isn’t “promising everything to everyone” or we’d be hearing about the Scandinavian crisis. We don’t hear a lot about the government debt of Sweden, Norway, or Denmark, even though they all have generous welfare states.
If you want real tort reform, you should consider making the tort system less necessary. A major component of negligence and malpractice judgments is damages for future medical expenses. Universal health care would make that element a thing of the past. Many people contact lawyers as a last resort. Make them less desperate and you’d see the number of lawsuits–particularly lawsuits involving huge damage awards–diminish accordingly.
Security for everyone is not inconsistent with a thriving economy.
An insurance company’s “hell hole” is a trial lawyers “honey hole”
And vice versa :)
It’s hard for me to have sympathy for insurers that do business in juriisdictions that are well known to have jruies that typically award higher amounts to plaintiffs. Why? Because they choose to do business there and they charge higher premiums knowing that the verdicts there will be higher.
No one is forcing them to do business in those states. Many insurers pull out of state because of the perception that they get home-jobbed by local judges and juries. It leads to less competition in those states and higher rates. At some point, the rates are high enough where the insurers can make a profit or high enough where consumers realize they need to pull back on generous awards.
This is where the free-market needs to work itself. We don’t need the governmet to step in and make “tort reform” rules. If you want government out of the way and out of your business, then you should not be supporting tort reform.
did you ever hear of the term “redlining”? That is basically what you are proposing, except for liability lines of coverage.
Also, if an insurance company does pick and choose territories as you indicate, can they be accused of “unfair discrimination”? You bet some greedy trial lawyer will sue to force the insurance companies to write in that territory, so his chance at a payday can be even bigger. Sorry – but lawyers are out of control in this country – and what is worse is they are writing all the laws, non attorneys dont stand a chance of getting elected to anything these days. They will never sanction or limit themselves. Congress is a prime example of this – pass Obamacare but make themselves exempt from it.
Philly is a judicial hellhole – why do you think they have more lawyers per capita than any other city?
It’s not redlining if you choose to withdraw from a state. Don’t like doing business in Philadelphia? Withdraw from the state. Safeco did that when I worked there.
Which is why many good doctors no longer practice in southern IL….due to outrageous lawsuit awards, many couldn’t get insurance, so they left the state and now my family has to drive to Missouri for doctor visits. How does this help the tax paying citizens, Obamapoint of view??
When the citizens get tired of having to drive long distances for medical care, they will stop outrageous lawsuit awards in order to encourage doctors to come back. That’s how the free market system works.
My point of view isn’t the Obama point of view. I’m way more liberal than he is. He’s caved in to Republican demands so many times now, his policies are no different than Republican policies. Except when he finally gives them what they want, the move the goalposts even further to the right. Obama’s policies are much further to the right than Eisenhower or even Nixon. Look at it rationally, without emotion and you will have to agree with me on that.
OPV, I like your decent and devil’s advocate style, but you are oversimplifying the issue. I don’t have to write insurance to feel the impact. If I avoid Florida, and I do, I still can have a products claim down there. Also, because of forum shopping, I could have a suit in Ill when I chose not to do business in the state. I can’t contemplate that in the rates since they are done at the state level. I agree with your point of not doing business in a state if you don’t like it, but that is just part of the mitigation.
We eliminated venue shopping with regard to Texas medical malpractice cases a while back, and it really helped to improve the legal climate. This was on a state level; it would probably take a Constitutional amemdment to do it on a national level.
Every year they come out with this list, and every year the lawyers rebut it. They might as well (and probably do) rubber stamp their responses.
Tort reform is just another example of Republican hypocrisy. They say they want to get government out of the way and out of our lives, but they love it when government tells juries how much they can award. Anything to placate their corporate overlords.
They also love to use censorship when they are offended.
It is not republican hypocracy. This is a nonpartisan issue. I do have not issue with a widow and her children getting the money they deserve so they can continue the life they had prior to the loss of dad (mom to be PC), but the Oprah Lottery Juries are irrational in these areas. I have been in NY court watching a juror get up and relieve himself, sit back down and be part of a verdict that was so out of scope of the damages it was sickening. Class action suits are abused by the plaintiffs bar. Thousands of people get coupons when they never realized they were wrong and then law firm gets fees for delivering the notices. There needs to be reason. It is not in crisis but it need to managed better.
It is hypocrisy to say “We want the government out of the way and out of our lives,” like the Republicans have been saying for years and then say that we need the government to put limits on jury awards.
I have no problem with someone saying we need to have tort reform if that’s how they feel (even though I disagree), but when they say that and then say they want government out of our lives it just screams of hypocrisy. What they really mean is that they like regulations that further their cause, but they don’t like regulation that they think hurts their cause.
If they would say that, I wouldn’t say they are hypocrites.
I actually think the word hypocricy is one of the most overused and misunderstood words.
“the act of feigning to be what one is not or to beleive what one does not.”
It is not hypocritical to say one wants limited government involvement and advocate some government intervention. You speak of being a replubicans as unconditionally wanting government out of our lives and they do not purport that. They want reasonable goverment intervention not an absense of it. Same for democrats. Netither agree with reasonable and I am OK with that. At any rate neither side is hypocritical.
So if you are going by the letter of the definition you beleive they are faking. That is a pretty extreme position.
Reminder that socialism, communism and
For the record I am not a republican or democrat. I tend to bug everyone equally.
Sorry to o many phone calls.
communism, socialism and fascism are product of the left wing liberals.
I worked for a med mal carrier in Texas at one point, and we definitely did our best to avoid writing policies in the Rio Grande Valley. Claims frequency and severity, especially for OB/GYN cases, was outrageous compared to elsewhere in the state.
This is all like “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”
…and they’re both mercenaries. Justice is too often an accidental by-product.
I feel like a squirrel that walked into the no man’s land between the trenches. Nobody can find common ground these days.
Democrats: Everything that is wrong in this country is the Republicans’ fault and the only way to fix it is to follow our plan exactly as written with no changes or addendum.
Republicans: Everything that is wrong with this country is the Democrats’ fault and the only way to fix it is to follow our plan exactly as written with no changes or addendum.
Lawyers: Everything in this country is Big Corporate’s fault and we should sue their pants off in every court in every state.
Big Corporate: Everything in this country is the Lawyers fault and we should eliminate the justice system as we know it
Where the hell did the moderates go? I swear i remember there were some at some point.
George, the moderates got hooked on capital gains and 401(k)’s the same way the old bootleggers are now hooked on crystal meth. Then they bragged about it at their $200 a month “country club” and left themselves no room for retreat. We never realized their souls were for sale. They were.
I’m following the Constitutional Conservative plan.
george, I understand your frustration, but I don’t think it’s accurate. The Democrats in Congress and this administration ahve compromised (and caved in comlpletely) so many times in the past three years it’s really ridiculous. The Republicans haven’t budged an inch and have even moved further to the right every time the democrats give ground.
Just look at last year’s budget battle. Obama and the Democrats proposed 9-10 Billion in cuts but the Republicans demanded $30-35 Billion. By the time the Democrats finally agreed to the $35 Billion figure, the Republican’s demanded $100 Billion.
Democrats have been trying to get a tax increase passed for three years, but Republicans havn’t given an inch.
Yeah, and the republicans will retort with a laundry list of where democrats have not been willing to compromise. I hate both of them. Not enough to vote for Ron Paul…but i’m getting damn close.
Our current mess IS the fault of both Dems and Repubs who continue to promise the moon and the stars to the citizenery. The promise of equal outcomes as opposed to equal opportunity is wrecking our country folks!
The lawyers who make up the vast majority of the population in Congress continue to support the bottom feeding injury lawyers whose ads appear on my TV over 30 times per evening. Yes, I counted.REAL tort reform is needed and it is needed yesterday.
Promising everything to everyone is what killed Greece and is about to wipe out the EU. I like Rick Perry’s suggestion that Congressmen’s jobs be made part time with very low salaries so we can have citizen legislators again. Term limits would help prevent vermin like Ted Kennedy and Barney Frank form corrupting the legislative process for so many decades.
There. I got it out of my system. May I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy and prosperous New Year. Even the lawyers.
Waterbug:
What killed Greece is tax evasion. http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2011/07/11/110711ta_talk_surowiecki
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/8585593/Greece-loses-15bn-a-year-to-tax-evasion.html
It doesn’t matter how high taxes are if people don’t actually pay them.
European nations with far more generous “welfare states” than ours, like Germany, are having to rescue Greece. The problem isn’t “promising everything to everyone” or we’d be hearing about the Scandinavian crisis. We don’t hear a lot about the government debt of Sweden, Norway, or Denmark, even though they all have generous welfare states.
If you want real tort reform, you should consider making the tort system less necessary. A major component of negligence and malpractice judgments is damages for future medical expenses. Universal health care would make that element a thing of the past. Many people contact lawyers as a last resort. Make them less desperate and you’d see the number of lawsuits–particularly lawsuits involving huge damage awards–diminish accordingly.
Security for everyone is not inconsistent with a thriving economy.
Gerry