Whose side are you on, Mr. President?
By HELEN THOMAS
THE Bush administration has it in for trial lawyers and is planning a
big push for "tort reform."
The public should be wary of this new attempt to curtail consumer
protection. And I hope Congress will slam the brakes on this White
House maneuver to trample on the rights of citizens who seek recourse
from doctors for malpractice and from big corporations for defective
products.
The administration has co-opted the word "reform" to roll back
progress and promote its goals of weakening government restraints in a
variety of areas.
It's noteworthy that the administration has never pursued the
corporate chieftains whose greed stunned the nation last year with the
same energy that it goes after lawyers who are fighting for the
consumer.
"Reform" implies intent to make things better and to correct defects
and abuses. But buyers, beware. This so-called reform is double speak
-- a euphemism to try to block private suits by trial lawyers in
behalf of consumers.
Egged on by many congressional Republicans, the administration wants
to put a $250,000 cap on malpractice awards for "pain and suffering."
It follows a speech President Bush made last July 24 when he claimed
that "the cause of the medical liability crisis is a badly broken
system of litigation that serves the interest of specialized trial
lawyers, not patients."
Medical doctors are especially happy over the elevation of Sen. Bill
Frist, R-Tenn., a surgeon, to Senate Republican leader. Frist has
championed capping malpractice awards. After he was elected to lead
his fellow GOP senators, Frist was praised by Donald Palmisano,
president-elect of the American Medical Association.
"It's encouraging to us that many issues (Frist) has championed are
our top priorities," said Palmisano. He said the AMA's top issue is
the $250,000 liability cap.
Frist also is the author of a provision in the Homeland Security bill
providing liability relief to the makers of Thimerosal, a
mercury-based preservative that recently has been added to various
childhood vaccines. The provision is applicable even to pending cases
and is expected to result in the dismissal of numerous ongoing cases
alleging that Thimerosal has caused autism in children.
In Bush's eyes, the bogeymen, of course, are those trial lawyers.
Trial lawyers are used to being demonized and they are a favorite
political target of conservatives.
When Bush was governor of Texas, he led a crusade to make the state's
legal system less helpful to consumers. He pushed through legislation
that capped punitive damages, limited class actions to federal courts
and made it easier for judges to impose sanctions on plaintiffs who
filed so-called "frivolous" lawsuits.
Let's have more of that "frivolity." That is actually a misnomer
because some of those lawsuits led to dramatic safety improvements,
forced on corporations through jury verdicts. Nothing gets their
attention like writing a big check to an injured customer.
The record is replete with tragic cases that produced verdicts and
precedents that have saved lives and prevented others from suffering.
Consider some of these lessons in recent years:
ú When women using super-absorbent tampons were dying from
toxic shock syndrome, the manufacturer -- Playtex --
disregarded studies that showed tampons were at fault. It
took a $10 million verdict to convince Playtex it would be
smart to remove the tampons from the market.
ú Eli Lilly was selling an arthritis pain-relief drug whose
side effects included a fatal kidney-liver ailment. It took
a $6 million jury verdict against the drug company to
persuade it to stop selling the medicine.
ú Another drug maker -- Johnson & Johnson -- knew that
Tylenol turned poisonous when mixed with alcohol but the
company did not put warnings on its bottles until a jury
socked it with a $8.8 million judgment.
There are two ways of enforcing consumer protections. One is through
government intervention. That's the job of agencies like the
Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the
Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Securities and Exchange
Commission, the Labor Department, the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission, the Federal Aviation Administration and a host
of others and their state and local counterparts.
The second way to enforce consumer rights is the private lawsuit.
Bush's war on the trial lawyers can only please those from the
consumer-be-damned school of corporate wrongdoing. In President Bush's
"compassionate conservatism," just whom does he feel compassion for?
I fear I know the answer.
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Thomas is a Washington, D.C.-based columnist for the Hearst Newspapers.
posted on January 5, 2003 12:56:58 PM new"It's noteworthy that the administration has never pursued the corporate chieftains whose greed stunned the nation last year with the same energy that it goes after lawyers who are fighting for the consumer."
It is precisely this attitude by the President and the GOP and those that support such anti-American doings that gather my criticisms in this forum. That they deserve it is beyond a doubt. That the President should be arrested and tried for Treason by not being FOR those who vote and support him. After all, there is such a thing as Justice and no office holder is higher than the law of the land. Certainly, if such laws no longer exist -- and Congress and the rest of our government have made every effort to make themselves free of such restraints, then by what right or obligation do we have to support him or them?
This then, is what I have to say: if our President will not support us; if our President continues to backstab us at every turn, then I feel that he is no longer deserving of either our respect or obligation to him. That goes for the office holders in Congress and the Supreme Court as well.
