Canadian doobies: "DISGUSTING!!"

[DukeP]

Didnt your president suggested a (still far to high, but much better) maximum of 250.000$ on reimbursments and "painCash"?

Thats a way to go, I think.
In Denmark, we are about to air a legislation that would max it at 1/8 of that - still a lot of cash.

~~DukeP~~

[Dr Mordrid]

He did and it's a very good idea that many states have adopted on their own including California, Texas and others.

Problem is that in many states the trial lawyers have the legislature in their pocket, which is why it has to change at the Federal level using Congresses authority over interstate commerce.

Dr. Mordrid

[KvHagedorn]

$250,000 is really not a lot of money when you talk about someone who has been crippled for life. I mean, what is that worth? Can you just cripple someone through negligence, or do any other awful thing like make them blind or impotent or whatever and owe these people nothing? It's the same thing all over again.. it's the little guy who gets screwed because of the rich prick's misdeeds. The answer to this problem is to limit the LAWYER's take from this sort of thing. Limit them to 10% of the award with a maximum cap of $25,000 and the abuse will go away while the really tragic cases can still hope for compensation. Duke, if some doctor were to accidentally make you deaf for life, do you think the limits of what he owes you for this crime should be capped at $30,000? You can never hear your loved one's voices again.. you can never listen to Beethoven.. you can never hear the ocean or the birds again.. and why? Because a wrongheaded law was enacted to punish YOU for the abuses of ambulance chasing trial attorneys. Really, with all the smart people here, I'm amazed at how many of you are debating the answers to the wrong question instead of questioning the question to begin with.

[Jammrock]

The $250,000 does not include lost earnings. If a man is crippled for life he can sue for a lifetime of lost wages. However, the pain & suffering suit would be llimited to $250,000. This would help a ton since the AVERAGE pain and suffering reward is well over $1 million.

Jammrock

[KvHagedorn]

The problem with this is.. what if you are 20 years old and working for minimum wage at Pizza Hut? Who knows what you might have been able to accomplish later in life if you had completed college and/or otherwise gotten yourself out of that rut? There really are some smart and talented people who just happen to be poor. But you are rendered blind somehow during an operation and are only allowed to sue for a lifetime of lost wages... minimum wage. And that's a long time to have to live being blind and dirt poor and without any hope, just because some doctor was impatient to get onto the golf course and didn't really give a damn about the penniless "indigent" he was forced to operate on. And even if this poor soul could somehow get an attorney, the rich ambulance chaser would take a third of that maximum $250,000 if he could manage to get it awarded. Trust me, you will see a lot of tragic stories like these if this ****ed up law goes into effect everywhere. This law was written with no regard whatsoever for its poor victims. The lawyers are bad so the fix targets poor victims instead of the lawyers. There is no flexibility here to address extreme cases. Go watch The Verdict if you've never seen it. A doctor's negligence puts some poor young woman in a coma for life and this law is going to limit his total liability to less than one year's salary for this offense. In this movie the jury awarded her something like $800,000 (in early 80s dollars) because they felt what was being asked was too paltry. Now lawmakers have done what they set out to do.. slam the poor (you wouldn't expect a collegium of glorified lawyers to punish their own guilty profession, would you? ). But slamming the poor even further into a hole is acceptable in America nowadays.. in fact it is seen as somehow being healthy. Look at all the jobs that have gone to China and Mexico, and all the illegal immigrants being taken advantage of for cheap labor now. Ordinary Americans are left with nothing but getting a job being a serf at Wal-Mart. This is now the land where you are worthless, expendable garbage unless you make more than $100,000 per year. This country has changed.. it's gone back to the 1800s from a socio-economic point of view. It's damned scary when a novel like Sinclair's The Jungle seems more contemporary now than it did when I first read it 20 years ago.

[Greebe]

Florida just capped malpractice insurance claims at $500k, the legislature/Pres little brother wanted $250k

[KvHagedorn]

So when is someone going to cap CEO salaries? Doctor salaries? Hospital Administrator salaries?

[Brian R.]

Sports star salaries

(Where's Gurm when you need him?)