Australia's Health Care System

[Biscuit799]

In Australia, law firms are not allowed to try malpractice suits on a contingency basis (where you only pay the law firm if they win). Thus, only the most potentially successful cases are brought to court. Malpractice insurance in that country is roughly $200 per year, well below the potential $200,000 per year here in America. I would like to hear my fellow SDN'ers comment on this, especially Law2Doc seeing as how he generally knows about these things.

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[liverotcod]

I have long felt that using contingency to pay for legal services brings out the worst in lawyers. If you eliminate contingency, though, you MUST create a fund to pay retainers for people who cannot otherwise afford it. It could work something like public defenders do now - imperfect, I realize, but more or less workable. This would be much cheaper than the way it is now.

 

[Biscuit799]

This is a good point, clearly people who cannot afford the legal fees should still be represented (although I have no stats on how often these kind of cases occur). I think a big point here is not necessarily reducing jury awards (as is a popular legislative battle around our country) but in simply reducing malpractice cases. Granted reducing payouts I'm sure would help the situation. Perhaps some kind of requisite hearing before the case goes to trial would help?

 

[Law2Doc]

If you eliminate contingency, though, you MUST create a fund to pay retainers for people who cannot otherwise afford it. It could work something like public defenders do now - imperfect, I realize, but more or less workable. This would be much cheaper than the way it is now.

I'm not a big fan of contingency fees, but the reason behind them is what liverotcod has mentioned. You need to give poor people access to lawyers and be able to assert and protect their rights. Otherwise lawyers just become a tool of the rich. Law is a business, and except for token pro-bono work required by some state bars, a lawyer will generally not do much for a client, or front the initial costs (for experts' fees, court costs, document preparation) unless their is a promise of getting paid/repaid. The public defender system mentioned is not a great solution, as those lawyers are among the worst paid and the quality is sorely lacking -- it generally represents the absolute minimum quality of legal services the constitution will permit. And unless you create a fund, it is paid for by taxpayers, so it would be a hard sell (possibly political suicide) to try and improve or expand the system to other forms of cases, on the public's dime. If you create a fund, who would get charged what? Have all doctors pay in notwithstanding that the odds of an OB/GYN to get sued are a zillion times greater than for eg. a dermatologist? But assuming you can work out these kinks, with a fund -- I suppose you could have court awarded lawyers fees -- this is what happens in vaccine cases before the US Court of Fed Claims (A small scale tort reform type system where victims of vaccines must sue in a specific court with awards distributed by a judge from a fund paid for by a tax on vaccines).
The right answer is probably to leave contingency fees as is, but to effect significant tort reform -- either to cap the maximum award for certain claims (to eliminate the lottery mentality of lawsuits), or to take it out of the jury system and have a special magistrate hear such cases and make awards that are more appropriate and reasonable under the circumstances.

 

[Law2Doc]

This is a good point, clearly people who cannot afford the legal fees should still be represented (although I have no stats on how often these kind of cases occur).

FYI Not exactly stats, but I can pretty much promise you that the majority of people who are plaintiffs in contingency suits are not particularly wealthy -- the more wealthy members of society just use their usual lawyers, who charge by the hour, and are also less likely to sue for smaller things.