Today both houses of Congress passed a “doc fix” bill so that Medicare will continue to pay doctors at their current rate. Without it, on March 1 doctors would have seen a 27 percent cut in the payments they receive for treating Medicare patients. The new “fix” expires January 1, 2013.

Today’s agreement may show us that some politicians have learned a lesson — that it’s not smart to use Medicare as a political football. For American seniors, Medicare is not a game, but a lifeline they depend on. This includes the majority of Americans diagnosed with mesothelioma, since the deadly lung cancer takes decades to develop and usually isn’t diagnosed in younger people.

The bill passed today has three main provisions: One, it extends a temporary cut in payroll taxes to the end of this year. Two, it extends unemployment benefits. And three, it overrides a Medicare reimbursement formula passed in 1997 that would have required the massive cuts to physicians’ Medicare pay.

You might remember Congress squabbling about this bill last December. Congress had failed to come to an agreement on these three items, which were set to expire at the end of 2011. The Senate cobbled together a two-month extension so that everyone could go home for Christmas and resume negotiations in January.

But on December 20, House Republicans rejected the extension bill. They wanted to wring some concessions from Democrats, such as relaxation of environmental protection rules, in exchange for their votes. House Republicans assumed the Democrats would be so frantic to get the bill passed they would give in to demands.

The Democrats refused to play chicken, however. House Republicans realized they had overplayed their hand, and that people would blame them if payroll taxes went up and doctors stopped seeing Medicare patients. On December 22, the House agreed to the two-month extension.

The bill passed today was agreed upon by Republican and Democratic leaders, and both parties made some concessions. Republicans dropped a demand that revenue lost through the payroll tax cut be offset with spending cuts. Democrats agreed to take money out of other health care programs to pay for the “doc fix.”

It appears Republicans in Washington decided that they didn’t want to begin a major election year by raising payroll taxes or messing with Medicare. “We’re dumb, but we’re not stupid,” Sen. John McCain said. “We did not want to repeat the debacle of last December. It’s not that complicated.”

This week Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton vetoed four “tort reform” bills passed recently by the state legislature. Governor Dayton also issued a stinging reprimand to the politicians responsible for the bills.

“These bills are laughably referred to as ‘jobs bills,’” the governor told reporters. ” Well, calling a crow a swan doesn’t make it one.” The bills would have had negligible impact on job creation in Minnesota, he continued. “The real impact would be to reduce the right of law-abiding citizens and businesses to seek justice from the wrong doing of others.”

The governor held up a copy of a booklet he called a “boot camp manual.” He said three of the four bills had been taken from the manual, published by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC.

What is ALEC? According to the New York Times, ALEC is an organization supported by millions of dollars from corporations like Exxon Mobil and Koch Industries, and ALEC’s board members come from many of the largest corporations. Its purpose is to get state legislatures to pass laws favorable to their business interests.

To that end, ALEC produces “template” legislation for lawmakers to introduce in their states. A recent study in Virginia found that more than 50 ALEC bills have been introduced in that state alone. Many of these bills are taken word-for-word from ALEC publications.

ALEC also holds seminars for legislators to coach them in “selling” the bills to the folks back home. Minnesota legislators had recently been treated to an all-expenses-paid “policy conference” at a posh Florida hotel.

“I’ve found that Minnesotans do not want their laws written by the lobbyists of big corporations,” Gov. Dayton said.

The bills would have changed the way corporations may be sued for personal injury and gutted many consumer protection laws. “Tort reform” bills protect corporations from lawsuits at the expense of people they or their products have injured.

The “tort reform” movement was initiated several years ago by tobacco companies and asbestos manufacturers. The companies were being sued by people suffering from mesothelioma and other lung cancers.

Now many other industries have signed on as well, and the corporations pour millions of dollars into “advocacy” groups like ALEC and the American Tort Reform Association to get laws written for their benefit.

Governor Dayton said lawmakers are putting ALEC’s interests ahead of the interests of Minnesota.

“Since these Republican bills so closely follow ALEC’s instructions on tort reform and since ALEC’s opinion on these subjects are evidently more important to Republican legislators than mine , their fellow DFL [Democratic-Farmer-Labor] legislators or the Minnesota Supreme Court’s, perhaps they would share with us all of the other ALEC boot camp manuals so we can know in advance what to expect from them for the rest of the session.

“If Republicans want to continue to prove to Minnesotans that they are too extreme to lead they should continue to throw ALEC’s ideology at us.

“If they want to begin to govern responsibly and work collaboratively, pass real jobs legislation, and my three measures have not even been taken up, real jobs legislation that will put Minnesotans back to work, then I’m ready to work with them.

“And I’m waiting.”

Skyrocketing health care cost and the aging of the Baby Boomers have put a terrible strain on Medicare. Voters who want to save the program must pay close attention to what candidates say about it, because the next President and the next Congress will be making critical decisions about Medicare. This program is a lifeline to American seniors,  including those with mesothelioma, which nearly always is diagnosed in people over the age of 50.

A win in the Nevada Caucus this weekend brought Mitt Romney closer to the Republican presidential nomination. So let’s continue to look at what he’s been saying about Medicare. A week ago, former Massachusetts governor Romney was promising Florida seniors he would protect their Medicare.

“Now, by the way, I understand a few of you here are on Medicare. Is that true? [Crowd laughs.] That being the case, I hope you tell your friends who always fear that Republicans somehow might go after Medicare, you can tell them a couple of things. One, we will never go after Medicare or Social Security. We will protect those programs. But also, you make sure and tell them this: There’s only one president in history that’s cut Medicare $500 billion and that’s Barack Obama. And guess what he did it for? He did it to pay for Obamacare?”

As discussed in the last post, Mr. Romney has explicitly endorsed the Paul Ryan plan for Medicare. Under the Ryan proposal, people currently on Medicare could stay in the original plan. But after 2020, seniors will be expected to purchase their own insurance. The government would provide “premium support.” sent directly to the insurers, to help offset the cost of insurance. To reduce the burden to the federal budget, the Ryan plan would keep the amount of “support” below the actual rate of medical inflation, so that over time seniors would have to spend more of their own money for health care.

Supporters of the plan say it would reduce cost in two ways — first, by having private insurance companies rather than government bureaucracy administer the program; second, requiring seniors to pay for their own care will make them smarter health care consumers. Critics of the plan point out that the cost of private insurance has gone up faster and higher than the cost of government programs like Medicare and Medicaid. And requiring seniors to pay more of their own medical bills probably will mean many retirees will do without care they need.

But what about the cuts President Obama made? John McDonough of the Boston Globe explains that those “cuts” actually were cost savings, not cuts to program benefits. For example, overpayments to Medicare Advantage providers is being phased out so that taxpayers pay no more for Medicare Advantage benefits than for regular Medicare. This will save taxpayers $135.6 billion. Not a single benefit has been cut from Medicare.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney hasn’t been elected president yet, but after his win in the Florida Primary he became the undisputed front-runner among Republican presidential candidates. So, by this time next year we could have a President Romney.

Almost one in five Florida voters is a retiree, and more than half of Florida Republican primary voters age 65 and over voted for Mr. Romney. And one of the ways Mr. Romney wooed Florida retirees was by promising to protect Medicare.

“We will never go after Medicare or Social Security, we will protect those programs,” Romney told an audience of seniors. “If I’m president, I will protect Medicare and Social Security for those that are currently retired or near retirement, and I’ll make sure we keep those programs solvent for the next generations coming along. … I will make sure that we protect Medicare and Social Security.”

Medicare is vital to seniors, including those with mesothelioma cancer, which nearly always is diagnosed in people over the age of 50. It’s also essential to younger adults whose parents have entered their Medicare years.

Many of those hearing the speech probably assumed Mr. Romney was pledging to protect Medicare in its present form. But that isn’t what he said. Brian Beutler points out at Talking Points Memo that Romney’s Medicare proposal, like all of the Republican plans for Medicare, includes a provision that seniors already on Medicare can stay in the present program.

However, these plans also call for the program to be drastically changed. As people currently working reach retirement age, the old Medicare program will no longer be available to them. That’s why Mr. Romney made a two-part promise:

Part One: “I will protect Medicare and Social Security for those that are currently retired or near retirement, and …”

Part Two: “I’ll make sure we keep those programs solvent for the next generations coming along.”

“”Keep those programs solvent” is Republican Speak for privatizing them. On his own campaign website, Mr. Romney plainly says that he endorses the Ryan Plan, which would phase in a privatized Medicare program very different from the Medicare program we have today. Under the Ryan Plan, in the future Medicare would no longer pay seniors’ medical bills. Instead, the plan would provide vouchers to help retirees pay for private insurance.

That might not sound so bad, but the plan endorsed by Mr. Romney also would keep the rate of these subsidies well below the expected increase in medical cost. Over time, seniors would be paying more and more of their own money for care. Further, policy experts who have analyzed the plan say that diverting money away from the “old” Medicare plan would drain it of funds, leaving the last few seniors on the old plan out of luck.

Mr. Romney’s problem is that he has to say one thing to keep conservative Republicans happy and something else to get votes. Conservatives want to get rid of government-run Medicare and divert tax dollars to private insurance companies. When he is talking to conservatives, Mr. Romney vows to do just that. But he didn’t explain that to Florida seniors.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is expected to win the Florida primary on Tuesday. Political pundits are saying that this would just about insure that Romney will be the Republican presidential nominee for 2012, although the pundits have been wrong before.

The last post looked at how Newt Gingrich’s past association with Medicare Part D is being used against him in the campaign. Now Florida television viewers are seeing ads accusing Mitt Romney of Medicare fraud. Could that be true? Here’s the story:

Back in 1989, the private equity firm Bain Capital purchased the Damon Corp., a medical testing company based in Needham, Massachusetts. Mitt Romney was head of Bain Capital at the time. In 1991 Damon became a publicly traded company, and Mitt Romney was on its board of directors. In 1993, Bain sold Damon to another company, Corning, at a nice profit.

However, in October 1996 Damon plead guilty to Medicare fraud and agreed to pay fines of $119 million. Federal prosecutors said that from 1988 to 1993 Damon had been billing Medicare for tests that had not been done. This was going on the entire time that Damon had been owned and managed by Mitt Romney’s company, Bain. Corning, not Bain, was given credit for discovering the fraud and putting a stop to it.

Mr. Romney was never personally implicated in the fraud, and today he says he knew nothing about it. However, the Damon Corp. fraud case came up in 2002, when Romney was running for governor of Massachusetts. According to ABC News, Romney said at that time that he had found out about the fraud and had “blown the whistle” on it, but it’s not clear that statement is true, either.

The issue of Medicare fraud is especially sensitive to Florida voters, and not just because almost one in five Floridians is retired. The current governor of Florida, Rick Scott, was once CEO of a company that was later convicted of Medicare fraud. Scott himself was not prosecuted. But Florida has not been happy with Gov. Scott; recent polls have found as few as 26 percent of Floridians approving of him.

Some anti-Romney television ads show Romney’s face morphing into Scott’s, to remind voters what happened the last time they voted for a politician connected to Medicare fraud. Whether this will resonate with Florida voters remains to be seen.

Mr. Romney has another Medicare problem, however. According to the Tampa Bay Times, “Florida Republican voters have a clear feeling about cuts to Medicare and Social Security: Don’t do it, according to a new poll by the AARP.”

Retirees understand how much they depend on the Medicare program, and this is true whether the retirees are healthy or suffering life-threatening illnesses such as mesothelioma, usually diagnosed in people aged 50 or over. And they want the program left alone.

But according to the Family Practice News, a journal for family practice physicians,

“Although his platform makes no overt mention of Medicare, analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted that, if enacted, Mr. Romney’s proposal to cap total spending and balance the budget would lead to a 17%-24% cut to Medicare by 2016.”

It’s not clear if anyone is explaining this to Florida voters, however.

Florida has long been popular with retirees. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 17.3% of Florida residents are age 65 and older, which is much higher than the national average of 13 percent. That’s almost one in five Floridians who have reached Medicare age. And health care issues are critical to seniors, whether they are healthy or suffering from a life-threatening illness such as mesothelioma.

Next week Florida will hold its Republican presidential primary election. The four candidates still in the running are Newt Gingrich, Rand Paul, Rick Santorum, and Mitt Romney. Much of their sparring this week has been over the past, and future, of Medicare prescription drug coverage, also called Medicare Part D.

Even though it was passed by a Republican-led Congress and signed into law by a Republican president, many conservatives have huge misgivings about Part D.  According to Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser for President Ronald Reagan, in its first ten years Part D will cost the federal government $1 trillion.

Worse, when the act creating Part D was passed, there was no consideration given to paying for it. Today, Congress negotiates every penny of new spending, often cutting the budget of one program to pay for another one. But the entire cost of Part D “all went on the national credit card,” Bartlett said. On top of that, the bill was criticized as a giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry because it forbids the government from negotiating for lower drug prices.

As explained in the last post, Newt Gingrich played a large behind-the-scenes role in getting the legislation passed that created Part D. This week, Mitt Romney accused Mr. Gingrich of influence peddling. While he was working to persuade Republican legislators to approve Part D, Romney said, pharmaceutical companies were contributing money to a think tank owned by Gingrich.

But Mr. Romney has a problem with Medicare Part D also. All four remaining candidates for the Republican presidential nomination have called for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, called “Obamacare.” The ACA already has provided additional assistance for seniors who fall into the “doughnut hole” prescription drugs coverage gap, and is scheduled to close the gap entirely.

If the ACA is repealed, these seniors’ prescription drugs costs would skyrocket. None of the candidates has addressed this issue.

Beyond Medicare Part D, however, the candidates have avoided talking about those “entitlements” that mostly benefit seniors. According to Alan Gomez in USA Today, “people are frustrated that the Republican presidential candidates have largely avoided the issues of Medicare and Social Security with the GOP primary coming up on Tuesday.”

Rep. Paul has said little about Medicare except that seniors ought to be able to opt out of it. But Gingrich, Santorum and Romney are on record as favoring some plan for privatizing Medicare as well as Social Security. In other states, they have been more forthcoming about their ideas for cutting, capping, privatizing, and downsizing Medicare and Social Security. In Florida, though — not so much.

Newt Gingrich’s win in the South Carolina primary is the biggest news in politics. Just a week earlier, polls showed that Mitt Romney would win the primary easily. This should remind us that the only poll that matters is the one on election day.

Mr. Gingrich’s ideas about Medicare and Social Security already have been discussed here. But you may not know that Mr. Gingrich played important roles in bringing about the popular Medicare Advantage program. A look at this bit of his history might tell us something about how Mr. Gingrich might want to change Medicare if he were president.

The future of Medicare really is in doubt. Some experts think the program can be saved as is with better cost control, but others want to dismantle the current system and replace it with a privatized one. So, it’s important for voters to have a clear idea where every candidate stands on Medicare. This is especially true for Americans diagnosed with mesothelioma, most of whom are in their Medicare years. The president and legislators we will elect in November will be deciding which way Medicare will go.

So let’s look at Newt Gingrich. In 1997, when he was Speaker of the House, Gingrich helped pass the law that created the Medicare+Choice or “Part C” plan. Medicare+Choice was a predecessor to today’s Medicare Advantage plan. Like Medicare Advantage, Medicare+Choice provided government subsides to private insurance companies to insure seniors.

Mr. Gingrich was certain a privately run Medicare would be more cost effective than regular Medicare, and he also believed it would be so popular with seniors that regular Medicare would “wither on the vine” and eventually be entirely replaced by Medicare+Choice.

As you may have noticed, these predictions were wrong. Medicare+Choice plans actually were more expensive to administer than regular Medicare, not less. And most seniors saw no good reason to switch from regular Medicare.

In 2003 Congress voted to add prescription drug benefits to Part C and rename it Medicare Advantage. Mr. Gingrich was not in Congress then, but he was in Washington speaking to groups of legislators to advocate for passage of the prescription drug program. Some who remember this have accused Mr. Gingrich of lobbying for the pharmaceutical industry, although Gingrich says he was not being paid and was only offering his advice as an expert on Medicare.

Medicare Advantage has proved to be more popular than Medicare+Choice. But once again, the privately run insurance plans proved to be more expensive than regular Medicare. On average, a medical procedure paid for through Medicare Advantage cost taxpayers 15 percent more than the same procedure paid by regular Medicare. This is supposed to change under the Affordable Care Act, which provides that eventually Medicare Advantage plans will have to bring their costs in line with regular Medicare.

Mr. Gingrich still believes that a privatized system is the way to go. His campaign website says Gingrich wants to “Create more choices in Medicare by giving seniors the option to choose, on a voluntary basis, a more personal system in the private sector with greater options for better care. This would create price competition to lower costs.”

However, first, seniors already have the option to choose to receive health insurance administered through the private sector with more options to suit their individual needs. That’s what Medicare Advantage does. And second, we’ve tried this twice already, and both times the privatized programs had higher, not lower, cost than regular Medicare. What would be do differently next time?

Last month Gingrich told an interviewer, “I would go to the insurance industry and say to them, is there a way you could make a premium support option really desirable? Well, it turns out Medicare Advantage has 25% of the market despite the opposition of the bureaucracy. So, if you had a bureaucracy that favored market oriented systems, you might actually get to 50% much faster than you think.”

However, he has not addressed the reality that privatized systems actually eat more taxpayer dollars than regular Medicare for providing the same benefits.

Texas Governor Rick Perry dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination this week, before tomorrow’s South Carolina primary. This is remarkable, considering that as recently as September pollsters were making Perry the favorite to win the nomination. And the pundits thought a conservative southern governor would win the South Carolina primary easily. But polls showed South Carolina Republican voters were not interested in Gov. Perry.

Last week, Gov. Perry also had lost a lawsuit filed against the Virginia Board of Elections and the state Republican Party to get his name on the Virginia primary ballot. Worse for Perry, he has come under fire in his home state of Texas for filing a frivolous lawsuit. Surely Perry and his fellow plaintiffs realized they had little hope of getting on the ballot, critics said.

Gov. Perry has been a big champion of “tort reform,” arguing that frivolous personal injury and malpractice lawsuits discourage business and increase health care costs. In the past several years the Texas legislature has passed one “tort reform” law after another, with no unambiguous evidence that the reforms either helped business or lowered health care costs. But that hasn’t stopped anyone, including Gov. Perry, for blaming “frivolous lawsuits” for everything but bad weather and pushing for more reform.

Writing in the Dallas Morning News, Wayne Slater pointed out that Perry had pushed for a “loser pays” law, so that a person who files a suit and loses must pay the court costs. Yet Gov. Perry made no offer to pay the costs of his suit. He was not obligated to do so, because it wasn’t filed under Texas law. But it would have been a nice gesture.

Tort reform laws such as the ones Gov. Perry support are sold to state legislatures by lobbyists working for corporations that tend to be sued — cigarette companies, for example. The “reforms” give corporations considerable protection from liability. They also punish people who suffer catastrophic injury by limiting the amount of damages they can collect — for example, people exposed to asbestos in the workplace who develop mesothelioma, a deadly lung cancer. Much of this exposure happened long after the dangers of asbestos were known.

What happened in Virginia? The state requires that candidates submit petitions signed by 10,000 registered Virginia voters to get on the ballot. Further, there must be at least 400 signatures from each of the state’s 11 districts, and only Virginia residents are allowed to circulate the petitions.

The Perry campaign said it submitted 11,911 petitions before the December deadline, but the Board of Elections said not enough of the signatures were valid, and the total fell short of 10,000. Gov. Perry sued to be placed on the ballot, anyway. The suit claimed that Virginia’s election requirements violated the Texas governor’s freedom of speech and association.

The suit later was joined by Newt Gingrich, who had also fallen short of the required number of petitions; and by  Jon Huntsman and Rick Santorum, who had not submitted ballot petitions at all.

A federal judge ruled that the plaintiffs should have sued much sooner if they thought the ballot law was unfair. The candidates knew the rules for months before the filing deadline, the judge said. Virginia needs time to print and distribute ballots before the March 6 primary.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s win in the New Hampshire primary this week cemented his status as the front-runner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. It also means some of his opponents are working overtime to knock him down.

A few days ago Mr. Romney remarked that “I like being able to fire people,” and this quote has been taken out of context and used against him. To be fair to Mr. Romney, he wasn’t saying that he enjoys firing employees. He meant “firing” a health insurance company and taking his business to another one that can provide him with better coverage. And, of course, that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

But since Mr. Romney may very well be the Republican presidential nominee, voters need to know what Mr. Romney thinks about providing health care for people. If he is elected, he would have a lot to say about what kind of insurance might be available to you and your family in the future.

And especially if you or a loved one suffers from mesothelioma or other life-threatening disease, do pay attention to what the candidates, including Mr. Romney, think about health care!

For the record, here is the quote from which the “firing” remark was taken:

“I want people to be able to own insurance if they wish to, and to buy it for themselves and perhaps keep it for the rest of their life and to choose among different policies offered from companies across the nation. I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep people healthy. It also means if you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. If someone doesn’t give me the good service I need, I’m going to go get somebody else to provide that service to me.”

In other words, he foresees a future in which most people would purchase their own health insurance the same way they purchase their own auto or homeowners insurance, so you wouldn’t lose coverage if you lost your job.

There are very few places in the world, other than the United States, in which private health insurance companies sell policies on an open market. In most countries where most people have access to health care, most health care is paid for by taxpayers. The two notable exceptions — Switzerland and the Netherlands — by law have a mandate that all citizens must purchase insurance from a private company, and the government regulates what the policies will cover and what they will cost.

Hmm, individual mandates, heavy regulations of insurance companies –  the Swiss and Dutch systems have all the elements conservatives hate about “Obamacare.” So where can we see how a real “free market” health insurance system works? There is no such place on this planet, unless you count the United States. And it doesn’t seem to be “working” here.

Ironically, the closest you can come to what Mr. Romney is talking about is Massachusetts, and that’s because of the reforms he pushed through as governor that became the model for “Obamacare.”

In Massachusetts, Mr. Romney has “good insurance options for a 64-year-old unemployed man with a wife who has a preexisting health condition: multiple sclerosis,” writes Margot Sanger-Katz and Meghan McCarthy in National Journal. “Massachusetts law, like a provision of the national health care law set to go into effect in 2014, requires insurers to offer coverage to all comers and limits the amount they can raise premiums because of a customer’s age or health history.”

In the rest of the country — until 2014, when “Obamacare” rules kick in — most of us take whatever health insurance we can get, or do without. Perhaps someone should explain that to Mr. Romney.

With the exception of Ron Paul, all of the current candidates for the Republican presidential nomination are on record as favoring “tort reform.” Tort reform laws are those that place limitations on personal injury lawsuits, such as caps on the amount of damages that can be collected.

One of the Republican hopefuls, Rick Santorum, has been called out as a hypocrite for advocating a $250,000 cap on damages even after his wife sought $500,000 in damages in a suit filed against a chiropractor. (Mr. Santorum retorts that this was his wife’s lawsuit, not his. A jury awarded Mrs. Santorum $350,000 in damages, but that amount was reduced to $175,000 on appeal.)

For several years, several industry-funded organizations have worked to convince politicians and the pubic that American courthouses are overrun with greedy plaintiffs hoping to win “jackpot” awards. This alleged epidemic of nuisance lawsuits is a drag on the economy and causes unemployment, it is claimed. One particular type of personal injury suit, medical malpractice suits, are blamed for runaway health care costs. You can find arguments that “tort reform” all by itself would eliminate the nation’s health care problems.

However, statistical evidence shows that this “epidemic” isn’t happening. In medical malpractice in particular, last year the National Center of State Courts and the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics released a study showing a dramatic decrease in the rate of malpractice suits being filed in the U.S.

Seen any reduction in your health care costs lately? Probably not. In state after state that has reformed its tort laws, the promised benefits — lower health care costs, economic growth, more jobs — have failed to materialize. Most of the data showing otherwise are from the 1990s, a time when the nation was enjoying good economic growth with or without tort reform.

The real effect of tort reform is to protect perpetrators from liability. People who are genuinely injured, and who have real need of damage awards, are the ones who are punished. For example, most Americans stricken with the deadly lung cancer mesothelioma are sick because they were exposed to asbestos in their workplaces — often construction work, shipyards, and mines. Much of this exposure took place long after it was certain that asbestos is dangerous. The plaintiffs are critically ill people, and they or their survivors need the damages to pay medical bills and living expenses.

Now, for Mrs. Santorum’s lawsuit — in 1999, Mrs. Santorum filed suit against a Virginia chiropractor, saying the chiropractor had caused permanent injury to her back. She sought $500,000 in damages. According to the ABC News Primetime program, her actual medical bills at the time of the trial totaled $18,800. The remaining damages were for compensation for lost income, the affect of the injury on her future health, and inconvenienced caused by reduced mobility.

Now, anyone who has ever had a bad back knows that back injuries really can restrict your life. Mrs. Santorum was about 40 at the time of the suit, and she could anticipate many active years ahead of her, raising her seven children and accompanying her husband on the campaign trail. Expenses for things like physical therapy or household help can add up, expecially when stretched over several years. This is what “pain and suffering” damages are for — to help pay for the anticipated costs of an injury that the plaintiff likely will face after the trial is over.

But for her husband to then push for caps on personal injury awards strikes many people as hypocritical. Rick Santorum, a former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, says now that Mrs. Santorum wanted to expose the chiropractor as a “bad actor” so that he couldn’t hurt other patients. That’s fine, but he still wants to limit how much other people can use the courts to expose other “bad actors.”