Trial Lawyer’s Free Fire Zone
July 16, 2008
In an op-ed in Pennsylvania’s Daily Local News, retired family physician Robert Poole describes what it’s like to have a target painted on your back in a trial lawyers’ free fire zone — in other words, what it’s like to be a doctor in Pennsylvania today.
Today, the pressing issue in the well-heeled suburb of West Chester is the need to open a trauma center to replace the one that was closed down in 2002 because of the medical liability crisis. This is in the same county, Chester, where trial lawyers have driven out every single practicing neurosurgeon. The county has set up a special Trauma Center Task Force to raise pubic awareness of the issue, as without major pubic subsidies to defray liability costs, the center is a non-starter. Taxpayers already pay into a state fund to subsidize liability insurance so the few remaining doctors don’t high-tail it out of state like so many of their colleagues. So once again, taxpayers are being asked to subsidize a broken system that serves no other purpose than to make trial lawyers rich.
According to Dr. Poole, when doctors from the Chester County Medical Society met with local legislators to plead for tort reform, they were told that until they could come up with the kind of campaign contributions regularly doled out by the Pennsylvania Trial Lawyers Association PAC they might as well be just spitting into the wind.
It’s estimated that the Trauma Center would save 10 to 12 lives a year – in other words, lives that are being sacrificed today to feed the greed of the Pennsylvania trial bar.