Full story in Sacramento Daily Press
By Robert Apodaca
Californians are footing a massive bill for our state’s broken legal system, to the tune of $72 billion. This system favors Wall Street speculators who fund efforts for frivolous lawsuits, taking advantage of lucrative payouts from medical malpractice cases. While these lawsuit abusers get rich off doctors and small businesses in an unbalanced court, California’s minority and low-income communities lose out on vital goods and services. Without meaningful tort reform to diminish the number of frivolous lawsuits being dished out across the state and their payouts, the scales of justice will only tip further in the direction of lawsuit abusers.
One of the primary missions of United Latinos Action (ULA) is to make sure our constituents receive affordable, quality health care. And our state’s Hispanic communities won’t be able to count on continued access to healthcare if our healthcare keeps getting victimized by our unbalanced legal system. California already has over 1.7 million uninsured Hispanics, a number that will only increase if premiums are forced upward in the wake of more frivolous lawsuits.
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Higher insurance premiums and lower quality healthcare aren’t the only side effects of our broken legal system. Lawsuit abusers don’t stop at healthcare, they go after any business with a potential for a large payout. For example, a motorcycle manufacturer was forced to pay over $100 million in damages after a motorcycle rider, who crossed multiple lanes of traffic and hit a car, blamed the manufacturer for the accident. This ultimately isn’t about justice, right or wrong, but rather who can cough up the largest payout. And there’s already plenty of that in California. The state leads the nation in jury verdicts worth $10 million or more. The larger these payouts get, the more difficult it becomes to do business in the state of California.
Meaningful tort reform will level the playing field and take the incentive away from lawsuit abusers. This means heading off efforts to raise the MICRA cap on non-economic damages and reversing Circuit Court decisions that removed the “courts’ ability to take the ‘litigiousness of the plaintiff into consideration.’”
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Fixing our legal system through lasting tort reform is the only recourse to remedy this situation. Failing to do so only enriches Big Business at the expense of ordinary, working Californians.