Belmont University

The Need for Tort Reform

Our legal system has created a lottery-like system out of our tort law. And many entrepreneurs end up being among the payors of the big winnings created by this mess.

The American Justice Partnership has released a new study this morning, Jackpot Justice: The True Cost of America's Tort System, that reveals some startling statistics.

America's out-of-control legal system imposes a staggering economic cost of over $865 billion every year according to a new scholarly study released today by the Pacific Research Institute (PRI), a free-market think tank based in San Francisco, California. This figure is 27 times more than the federal government spends on homeland security, 30 times what the National Institutes for Health dedicate to finding cures for deadly diseases, and 13 times the amount the Department of Education spends to help educate America's children.

Here is a link to the full report and here is a link to a video of Dr. McQuillan, lead author of this tort system study.


Posted by Jeff Cornwall on March 27, 2007 07:46 AM |

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Comments

I think we need to remember that the tort system exists to protect the rights of citizens to be justly compensated for any injury they sustained due to the negligence of another. I believe that a person should be compensated in accordance to what a jury decides. If a doctor chops my left arm off instead of my right arm, you better damn well understand that I will not want my compensation "capped" at some measly sum of 350,000.

Birdied by: mike | March 27, 2007 11:25 AM

Every virtue has two ditches. One of excess and one of defect. Certainly we need to protect against the ditch of defect when it comes to tort reform. At this point, I am most concerned with the ditch of excess. That is the ditch that our current system is now operating within.

Birdied by: Jeff | March 27, 2007 01:58 PM

Tort reform won't happen, because those who benefit from it are primarily responsible for deciding the changes to make in it.

Personally, i believe Insurance Reform should happen. The fact that insurance companies get to decide which claims to honor, which not to honor, and reserve the right to change the terms of the contract with every renewal is criminal.
All of us will be battling insurance companies as a our full time job when we retire, as each insurance company rejects claims, requires 'more info', disputes the results of doctors, and basically plays a passive-aggresive game of not honoring the terms of the contract.

Birdied by: bob | March 28, 2007 01:38 PM

Tap it in and Comment, Please

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