In Britain, less fearful M.D.s

David Asman, reflecting on his wife’s experience in British and American hospitals, notices some patterns (“There’s No Place Like Home”, American Spectator/Wall Street Journal, Jun. 8):

There is also much less of a tendency in British medicine to make decisions on the basis of whether one will be sued for that decision. This can lead to a much healthier period of recuperation. For example, as soon as my wife was ambulatory, I was determined to get her out of the hospital as much as possible….

Now try leaving a hospital as an inpatient in the U.S. In fact, we did try and were frustrated at every step. You’d have better luck breaking out of prison. Forms, permission slips and guards at the gate all conspire to keep you in bounds. It was clear that what prevented us from getting out was the pressing fear on everyone’s part of getting sued. Anything happens on the outside and folks naturally sue the hospital for not doing their job as the patient’s nanny.

Why are the Brits so less concerned about being sued? I can only guess that Britain’s practice of forcing losers in civil cases to pay for court costs has lessened the number of lawsuits, and thus the paranoia about lawsuits from which American medical services suffer….

Feds’ tobacco-suit shift, cont’d

L.A. Times has some good coverage of the Justice Department’s much-criticized decision last week (see Jun. 10) to scale back the damages it’s asking in its wretched Clinton-legacy tobacco suit:

Law professor Turley [Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, not suspected of overmuch sympathy with the views of this page] said he believed “legal realism and political realism” were the main reasons for the 11th-hour retreat.

The Justice Department had “seemed to be in institutional denial,” Turley said of the consequences of the appeals court defeat [in February, before a D.C. Circuit panel]. “By reducing the (requested) damages it brings the case more in line with that ruling.”

Noting that the case has lasted six years at huge cost to the government, Turley said Justice officials are “very sensitive about the ‘resume factor’ in this case.” The change “lays the groundwork for the spin that they labeled the industry as racketeers and they got the damages they asked for,” he said.

Tobacco lawyers have ridiculed the new proposal. Ted Wells, a lawyer for Philip Morris USA, said it was a $280 billion case, then a $130 billion case, now a $10 billion case and “eventually it will be a zero-dollar case.”

(Myron Levin, “Civil case against tobacco is turning to ash”, Los Angeles Times/Detroit News, Jun. 11).

More on pill-splitting

Does a health insurer risk legal liability if it urges its insureds to save money on prescriptions by splitting pills in two, and even provides them with pill-splitting devices to do so? On Mar. 25 Ted reported on the apparent failure of one such lawsuit; now Beldar (Jun. 10) and his commenters are having an extended discussion of the question.

Update: Mississippi scandal latest

When prominent Mississippi trial lawyer asked his old law school classmate Leonard Radlauer to do him a favor — serve as the go-between in a transaction in which Minor paid off a $118,652 loan owed by former circuit judge John Whitfield — Minor was quite concerned that the local media not get wind of the transaction, according to Radlauer’s testimony in the ongoing corruption trial. Oops… (Jimmie E. Gates, “Minor’s money transfer recalled”, Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Jun. 7). More: Apr. 30, 2005, Sept. 20, 2003 and many others.

Publicity roundup

Texas Lawyer has a well-reported and personality-filled article, unfortunately not online, detailing how the state’s plaintiffs lawyers became “in many ways…the victims of their own success”; it happened when “tort reformers, provoked by the plaintiffs bar’s hubris, particularly as it was asserted at the state Capitol in Austin, galvanized themselves over the past 15 years to topple the trial lawyers’ dominance over Texas politics.” Also a lot about asbestos-suit reform (Miriam Rozen, “Paradise Lost; Plaintiffs Bar Bemoans End of an Era as Tort Reformers Target Asbestos”, Texas Lawyer, Feb. 28, not online). A Medill News Service dispatch from last December quotes me on the subject of class action jurisdiction (Betsy Judelson, “On the Docket: Getting Out of Madison County”, Medill News Service, Dec.). And Automotive Industries, in an ambitious backgrounder on the liability explosion, mentions my Hillsdale College speech of last year (Gary Witzenburg, “Urgent Need for Tort Reform”, April).