On the Right - Trial Lawyers vs. Sanity.(patients' bill of rights brings focus to need for tort reform)(Brief Article)

NEW YORK, JUNE 8

A week or so back, Blockbuster, Inc., signed a consent decree. The aggrieved were folks who were "overcharged" for overdue rented movies. Retribution for movie renters will be in scrip, with a limit per Blockbusterite of $18 in credit, about six movies. The winner, of course, is the trial lawyer. Is there one human being this side of the crazy houses who believes that an enterprising victim undertook to hire a lawyer to engineer a class-action suit in search of $18 worth of free movies?

Then last week in California a jury awarded a 56-year-old smoker $3 billion against Philip Morris. Everybody knows all the arguments on the cigarette controversies, but the argument that stood out in Los Angeles wasn't that Philip Morris never advertised the dangers of smoking, but that the Marlboro Man ads create an impression of the bionic man, whereas what is really happening to the smoker isn't that his chest is swelling with pride and health as he surveys the great western scene, but that his lungs are deliquescing. Those are valuable lungs, this plaintiff's. At $3 billion, they're worth more than the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center combined. But again, the interest here is the trial lawyer, who could claim $900 million, which is testimony to the lunacy of jurors, and the delinquency of Congress in doing nothing about tort reform.

Front and center in these matters is the patients' bill of rights. This issue got much attention at the Democratic national convention last year. It featured Bill Clinton striding to his throne on stage through a long royal tunnel flecked with diamonds and moon dust, his passage illuminated by a visionary camera that tracked his way through the labyrinth, on to the podium, where he proclaimed the patients' bill of rights.

Now it is obvious that patients should have rights. Conventionally, these are rights protecting against fraudulent or tortious action. If a doctor amputates your left leg when it was your right leg that was giving you the trouble, you have a right to claims. If a manufacturer gives you insulating material for your house which gives you warmth but also induces cancer, you have claims. As also if the pill you take, far from aborting the fetus, makes quintuplets out of him, you have a claim.

But the bill that has been introduced by Sen. John McCain and Sen. Ted Kennedy is one that would give the trial lawyers ...