Saturday, May 10, 2008

Mississippi: What happened after tort reform

WSJ: "Almost overnight, the flow of lawsuits began to dry up and businesses started to trickle in. Federal Express invested $1 billion in a new facility in the state. Toyota chose Mississippi over about a dozen other states for a new $1.2 billion, 2,000-worker auto plant. The auto maker has stipulated that the company would pull up stakes if the tort reforms were overturned by the legislature or activist judges.

That hasn't happened. About 60,000 new jobs have arrived in four years – not a small number in a workforce of about 1.3 million – and a sharp improvement from the 30,000 jobs lost in the four years before Mr. Barbour took office. Since the law took effect, the number of medical malpractice lawsuits has fallen by nearly 90%, which in turn has cut malpractice insurance costs by 30% to 45%, depending on the county."

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Comments:
It is worthwhile reading the entire Wall Street Journal article, which is excellent. Thanks for posting an excerpt.

All of this makes absolutely no diffence to the trial lawyer industry scam artists, who will simply deny the amazing positive benefits to society from Mississippi or Texas reform of their corrupt malpractce systems.
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : 8:25 PM
 
Not to minimize the benefits of malpractice tort reform, but I suspect business acted as it did because of cleaning up class-action litigation and other corporate shakedowns done by the tort bar.
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : 1:00 PM
 
I've read about a hostpital in PA that has circumvented the tort system in another way: they 'fess up to their mistakes before being sued. The number of payouts has increased, but the overall amount paid out has decreased. It seems that one of the things people really want is for their doctors to acknowledge their mistakes rather than hope they're never noticed. Maybe the adversarial system isn't the best approach to the doctor-patient relationship?
# posted by Anonymous Calvin : 10:11 PM
 
Mississippi was a real tort hell-hole. The system was overtly unfair and we now find that one of Mississippi's tort kings was engaged in bribery of the judiciary.
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : 10:56 PM
 
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