A Familiar Map

OK, this concept has been circulating on the Web for the past day or so... this is a little rework of the basic idea. 'Nuff said.

Personal Ad

Now HERE is a personal ad for the post-election season....

Tort Reform?

One of the reasons that many doctors who were otherwise socially progressive supported Bush was the issue of tort reform. The president made this an issue in the debates, and has identified malpractice lawsuits and the resultant defensive medicine to be a majore problem in this country. This, of course, dovetailed nicely with an attack on vice-presidential candidate John Edwards, who has a background as a plaintiff's attorney. And despite evidence cited by John Kerry that such suits only add approximately 1% to overall health care costs, a lingering impression of a litigation crisis persists.

However, like most wedge issues, this is in many ways oversimplified for political gain. While it is true that there are frivolous malpractice and product liability lawsuits, there are also a large number of individuals every year who are seriously harmed through negligence with major financial (as well as personal) implications. Tort reform is often a euphamism for clamping down on an individual's right to sue, while leaving corporations with free access to the court system. Interestingly, corporations file approximaely four times as many lawsuits as do individuals (despite the fact that there are 40 times as many individuals as corporations in the United States). Furthermore, these lawsuits are significantly more likely to be sanctioned as frivolous by the judges involved.

The contingency system is often cited as evidence against the current tort system, rewarding attorneys with a significant percentage of any judgements or settlements. However, without this system there would be essentially no access to the courts for most individuals. Very few people would be able to pay the up front costs of litigation out of pocket, especially if they feared that they might lose despite the merits of a case.

This is not a simple issue, and there needs to be a comprehensive approach to the overuse of the courts to solve social problems. Physicians may have to leave undersserved areas because of crushing malpractice premiums, and some product liability litigation has implications in the marketplace. However, the answer cannot be simply to limit individual's access to legal remedies while preserving the same rights in the corporate camp.

Finally, take a look at this site, summarizing how major proponents of tort reform have been quick to take to the courts themselves. One highlight is George W. Bush's seemingly frivolous $2000 lawsuit in 1999 against Enterprise Rent-A-Car!

Wikipedia Rocks!

If you don't know about Wikipedia, take a moment to check it out. This vast online encyclopedia with extensive cross-linking of references is an example of an "open source" project. Open source implies decentralized creation of content (in this case, the encyclopedia entries) by many people all over the world, and freely distributed without restriction or copyright. In fact, the proponents of open source projects use the term "copyleft" to describe how such material should be shared. Probably the most recognizable example of a project like this is Linux, the open source operating system.

Voting Update

While it seems pretty clear that the American election system is in need of a comprehensive, secure, verifiable and bipartisan overhaul effort, the ongoing analysis of the recent results doesn't seem to be turning up any smoking guns. Here are some more takes on this data (if you really want to dig into it!).

A set of comments on an analysis done at Princeton is available here and this site goes over the Florda results in some detail. Ideamouth covers the voting fraud allegations state by state. Even Salon has weighed in, concluding that the election results, while disappointing, were probably clean.