PART 9 of 10: Texas is now mandating voters buy cars without brakes.
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The lesson today has to do with facts or the lack thereof. First let’s look at shaping the emotions of tort reform minded voters and then at why tort reform is creating a greater needs for personal injury trial lawyers.
THE EMOTIONS OF HATRED
Where are the facts underlying that the medical profession can not afford to pay Mr. Fitzgerald his non-economic damages. Why is it important to tort reformers to make people hate injured people? The tort reform propagandists win by generating hatred and using raw emotions that interfere with your intellect. It’s about separating reason from the vote for or against legislation. It’s about you believing the conclusion without asking for proof. Let’s examine how this has been used in the past.
HE MAY BE A LIBERAL TRIAL LAWYER! OR WORSE YET A FARMER!
It’s embarrassing how naïve we Americans have become and how easily we are misled. You may argue with me that America is not being misled by those with something to gain. We haven’t forgotten Bernie Madoff have we? Mr. Madoff’s people boasted that 10% of the securities being traded in the stock market went through Madoff investments. Even better this Madoff supporter introduced Madoff with a glowing description and then handed the microphone over where Bernie Madoff explained his “trading strategy” and how Wall Street was “over regulated.”. The only thing Bernie Madoff left out of the description, which investors needed to make him prove was that this wasn’t a Ponzi scheme. Essentially Bernie talked in conclusions without support for how he was trading and creating a return on your money invested with his firm.
Tomorrow let’s look at Bernie Madoff and what he said to investors that can teach us how tort reformers approach you as if you’re not smart enough to know how tort reform will affect you, should you be injured.
The misuse of emotions to sell an idea
Who protected this man and why might personal injury lawyers be the intended focus? Could it be to avoid society focusing on the Wall Street lawyers and law firms? It certainly wasn’t the personal injury lawyers who set up the Ponzi system used by Madoff investments.
TORT REFORM WILL MAKE A GOOD PERSONAL INJURY LAWYER YOU BEST FRIEND
Texas sent out a huge invitation; one that invited mistake prone physicians to practice on Texas patients. Come to Texas and if you make a mistake, we pass on the costs to the patients. That was the invitation and according to Texas tort reform propaganda it’s working.
Read my previous posts about David Fitzgerald and how he was treated by Texans for Tort Reform. I bet they don’t ever mention Mr. Fitzgerald in one their ads about how Texans injured by medical mistakes are treated under Texas Tort Reform. What they do in Texas is entice physicians to practice on you by offering to shift the cost of their mistakes to you, the patient. No voter in their right mind should find this comforting, but consistently they vote for it out of unfounded fears that doctors are going to suddenly stop practicing medicine.
BUYING THE CAR THAT HAS NO BRAKES
Why should patients be concerned? Because patients in Texas are choosing medical care and relying, not on information, but on blind faith. Texas patients have to believe and assume their physician isn’t the one that ever made a medical mistake. Texans have to believe the hospital where they are being admitted never had a case of infection or mistake that killed or maimed a single patient. You have to or you would demand more information before allowing a doctor to cut on you or before agreeing to be admitted into any hospital.
Here is an analogy that might help. If you were buying a car and were concerned about safety you would want to know how a car performed in safety tests. If information were available that workers sometimes forget to install brakes on all four wheels you would probably not buy that car. Selecting a surgeon is a far more important decision than buying a car. Yet we have more information about car safety than we do about surgeons and hospitals. If a certain hospital had very high infection rates and lousy results for certain medical procedures you’d probably opt for another hospital with better results. Yet we don’t have that kind of information about hospital infection rates.
So when tort reforms shift the costs of those mistakes to you the patient it’s probably a good idea to know what risks and mistakes you’re going to be responsible to pay for.
In order to shift the costs of medical mistakes Politicians offer tort reform; and that’s broken promise. It’s broken because you get the increased share of costs from medical mistakes, while not having information about the risks patients face with any one doctor or hospital system. How can patients who are being asked to shoulder the expense of a physician’s mistakes make a reasonable choice of who to select without the appropriate information about the physician or surgeon’s history of mistakes and the hospital’s history with infection rates? It’s like buying a used car that is locked in a windowless garage. You risk your life by undergoing surgery without knowing the risks of mistakes and infections. With tort reform that shifts the costs of mistakes to the patient you need more, not fewer trial lawyers.
Tort reform is a run-a-way car unable to brake for a crash.