the limits in michigan that were mentioned are misleading. the amounts of the limits are for only one type of damages--noneconomic damages. politicians call this "pain and suffering" damages, but it also covers the financial hardship faced by the paralyzed or dead person's family when they no longer have a father or husband working in a blue-collar home, for example. also, the dollar amounts given are wrong. the statutory limits were and are set to increase annually, so they are actually higher than those given by a decent amount.
the problem with tort reform is that it sounds good, but was enacted to either make insurance companies happy or to placate physician lobbyists. the problem with the latter reason is that tort reforms actually don't work to lower doctor's malpractice insurance, and are of dubious effectiveness in controlling those costs AT ALL. at the same time, realize that everything or anything done to limit a doctor's liabilty is going to simultaneously limit every injured patient's ability to recover damages. get the idea of the cheating liar patient and the scumbag lawyer out of your minds--they exist, but much less than you'd believe. much more common are the patients who lost their legs or died or had a huge chunk of their ass resected because the nursing staff and the docs let them develop stage four decubitis out of sheer laziness. if it's cool for a patient, regardless of age or earning capacity, to lose one or two legs or to die because a nurse would rather have spent her nights BSing with other nurses than turning her immobile patient from time-to-time as the standard of care requires, and then on top of that to tell the patient to go to hell because they don't deserve any money for their missing legs because someone else wants to make profit (and, coincidentally, that same someone else is the party responsible for your missing legs!), then it begs the question of whether you really belong in the medical profession.
first do no harm. not "first protect your wallet." the biggest problem, as i said, is that tort reforms do NOT protect docs' wallets, but they DO strip away patient rights. don't buy it from me--go to the GAO website (Goverment Accounting Office) and go through their many reports on the subject.
