Joan Claybrook on Tort Reform

You may remember Joan Claybrook from her days as head of NHTSA: the 85-mph speedometer, the experimental safety motorcycle that nobody could keep upright. She's baaack.

Here's a letter she wrote to The Baltimore Examiner:

In regards to “Tort reform for a healthy Baltimore and Maryland,” (July 6) Kurt Schmoke’s advice to Marylanders is based on faulty economics and misinformation.

Cutting off citizens’ access to the courts would benefit negligent corporations and the insurance industry at the expense of the working poor.

Schmoke suggests that restrictions to civil justice access would lower automobile insurance rates by reducing incentives for low-income citizens to seek compensation when they have been hurt in an auto crash.

But he ignores the real costs to society when injured people miss work because they cannot pay for new transportation or proper medical care.

Schmoke erroneously claims that people “flock to the tort system the way they do to a lottery.” Public Citizen’s research shows that people who seek compensation in the courts are typically the most severely injured. Nonmeritorious claims are dismissed or go uncompensated* and only one in 10 injured people who could sue actually do so.

Schmoke asks Marylanders to accept a double blow: limiting their legal rights and taking away compensation for injuries. This would only further harm Baltimore’s most vulnerable citizens.

 Joan Claybrook
President, Public Citizen
Washington

*Of course, Ms. Claybrook entirely misses the point, which is that the cost of defending oneself against a "nonmeritorious claim" proves an unbearable burden on many plaintiffs. Thus, many nonmeritorious cases are settled out of court to save the cost of trial, enabling what amounts to legal extortion. Not to mention how the tort system is so frequently misused to inflict the Death of A Thousand Cuts to politically unpopular targets such as firearms manufacturers and dealers. For example, Michael Bloomberg's adventures south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

tags: rkba  abuse of power  

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