Why is tort reform bad?
Never before has there been such an effort by special interests to make money by avoiding accountability for their bad practices. The effort to avoid accountability has centered on a relentless attack on the rights of Americans to use the judicial system to protect themselves and their families.
A primary goal of this attack is to shift the cost of paying for consequences of defective products, careless practices, and shortsighted management policies away from large corporations and insurance companies. To the extent that such an effort is successful, these costs will largely fall on middle class families who will pay higher taxes to provide care for those who are injured by careless conduct, environmental pollutants, and defective products.
The costs associated with the loss of tax revenues from those who cannot earn income due to impaired earning capacity, and larger costs associated with the disruption of families from injured or killed family members, will also be shifted from wrongdoers to middle class families.
The goal of the tort reformers is to reduce judicial oversight into dangerous practices. This will breed corruption in our free enterprise system, resulting in practices that disregard common safety issues to achieve better shareholder earnings. These practices are exemplified by the tobacco industry, which committed systematic fraud concerning the dangers of its product.
American families will be at a much higher risk for injury or death due to defective products and less able to hold insurance companies responsible for dealing in bad faith with insured’s. Think about scandals, Firestone Tires and Fenphen Diet Drugs. Those scandals may never have been discovered if legislation proposed by these special interests had been enacted.
