Trial Lawyers Not Holding Up Healthcare
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
A recurring theme in conservative arguments against health care reform is that, somehow, all the problems are caused by “trial lawyers.” One Republican politician after another will tell you the Democrats’ bill was written by “trial lawyers,” who as a group are said to favor Democrats. They say Democrats are less supportive of “tort reform” than Republicans because “trial lawyers” are big campaign contributors.
They don’t mention that the entire “tort reform” movement was initially underwritten by Big Tobacco and is now kept alive through generous funding by a host of big corporations that channel money through contrived activist organizations like the American Tort Reform Association. And the same sectors of the economy that fund “tort reform” also happen to be big Republican donors. Fancy that.
For must-read research on why conservatives went to war against the legal profession, see “The Attack on Trial Lawyers and Tort Law” by Dave Johnson at the Commonweal Institute. Johnson documents how the tort reform “movement” has been orchestrated by “a small cluster of conservative foundations, motivated both by an ideology interest in weakening constraints on the conduct of corporate entities and a political agenda that seeks to limit trial lawyers’ ability to contribute money to ‘the left’.” They have gone so far as to spread crude cartoons and jokes ridiculing and demeaning trial lawyers.
The “tort reform” movement began in the 1980s when Big Tobacco companies like Philip Morris were being hit with lawsuits from lung cancer patients. Big Tobacco was soon joined by other corporate interests, such as asbestos manufacturers whose employees were stricken with asbestosis and mesothelioma cancer. Today mesothelioma lawyers are often singled out for especially harsh criticism.
But insurance companies balk at paying for treatment for such devastating diseases, assuming the sick person is insured at all. People hit with life-threatening diseases need help, and in our current mess of a system sometimes a lawsuit is the only way to get that help.
But now the attacks on lawyers are getting broader, and scarier. Now attorneys are being demonized for taking on controversial cases and defending unsympathetic clients.
Case in point: Some prominent conservatives recently orchestrated a smear campaign against lawyers now in the Justice Department who, in the past, represented Guantanamo detainees.
A group called Keep America Safe branded this group of lawyers the “Al Qaeda Seven,” and released a video accusing them of un-American values. Keep America Safe is run by Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, and William Kristol, a conservative activist and “pundit.” Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website accused the lawyers of “caring more for their political ideological creed than for the safety of US citizens” and predicted darkly that such lawyers would use “procedural tactics” to allow terrorists to go free.
To their credit, this smear went too far even for some conservatives. The Constitution doesn’t say only popular people deserve fair trials.
—Barbara O’Brien
