Wikipedia cites a study which came up with these results from a study of medical malpractice suits which were settled:
97% of suits were associated with an injury. 73% of them got compensation.
3% of suits were not involved with an injury. 16% of them got compensation.
63% were associated with errors. 73% of them got compensation (average: $521,560).
28% were not associated with errors. 28% of them got compensation (average $313,205).
Claims not associated with errors accounted for 13 to 16% of the total costs.
So fewer people with legitimate complaints are recovering than should be, and more without legitimate complaints are, but the large majority of the money goes to parties who were actually injured by an error.
The big downside: about half the money that got paid out went to courts, experts, and lawyers.
Also, here's the CBO report from the article:
CBO: Typical proposals have included:
* A cap of $250,000 on awards for noneconomic damages;
* A cap on awards for punitive damages of $500,000 or two times the award for economic damages, whichever is greater;
* Modification of the “collateral source” rule to allow evidence of income from such sources as health and life insurance, workers’ compensation, and automobile insurance to be introduced at trials or to require that such income be subtracted from awards decided by juries;
* A statute of limitations—one year for adults and three years for children—from the date of discovery of an injury; and
* Replacement of joint-and-several liability with a fair-share rule, under which a defendant in a lawsuit would be liable only for the percentage of the final award that was equal to his or her share of responsibility for the injury.
The noneconomic damages cap is contentious because it creates a situation where doctors don't have the monetary incentive to extend anywhere near the same level of care toward poor people or homemakers as they would with someone expected to make a lot of money during their lifetime. Economic damages, basically recovery for one's lost ability to make money, aren't capped, so if you accidentally amputate both arms of a tennis star, you pay a lot for that, but both arms of a housewife? eh.
The "monetary incentive" is, by the way, a standard way of looking at lawsuits for injury: other than punitive damages, the money you pay out isn't a punishment for doing something wrong but rather a cost of doing business. This makes a lot of sense: if your industry is something that is inherently unsafe, you can still proceed with your activities, but you factor in the cost of paying damages to the people your industry injures. This lets industries that, for example, dump harmful chemicals continue to operate, but also provides recovery for their inadvertent victims. It's more troublesome in the medical profession, because mistakes are so common, and because they deal directly with people's bodies.
As for punitive damages, they are applied only in the most egregious cases (and certainly should be reserved for such cases), and US judicial tradition is strongly predisposed to not allowing punitive damages be more than 4 times compensatory damages, though it can happen (judges have the ability to reduce or throw out punitive awards from juries that they think are too high, and they're not bashful about doing so). My opinion is that if punitive damages are limited only to the worst of the worst (and for the most part they are) they're fine as-is. Even the ultraconservative supreme court of South Carolina just found that,
in the worst cases, it's ok to award disproportionate punitive damages.Joint and several liability: the idea of this is that if more than one party is found liable for an injury, the injured party can collect their damages from ANY of the liable parties (so of course they always collect from the one with the deepest pockets) and the liable parties that pay out are left to try and get their fair share of the money from the parties that didn't. Basically, this means that if a rich guy and a poor guy hurt you and are both 50% responsible, you collect 100% from the rich guy and he's left to try and squeeze whatever money he can from the poor guy. Unfortunately for rich guys everywhere, the same holds true if the rich guy is only 1% liable.
Joint and several liability is used for three things in American law (it's much more common on the other side of the pond). First is when parties act concertedly. For example, if three guys beat you up and break your arm, they're jointly and severally liable. No need for you to worry about which one broke it; they can settle that amongst themselves. Second is when it's impossible to tell how much damage each party is responsible for, like when a person has been sickened by water tainted with a chemical that more than one company has been pouring in the river. Third, and this is the big one: employers are jointly and severally liable for what their employees do in the course of their employment. So if a UPS truck hits you while it's making rounds, you collect from UPS, even if it's the driver's fault (and UPS colects what they can from their driver). The second and third kinds of joint and several liability are big in the medical industry. The second because it's pretty much impossible for an injured person to know exactly who left that sponge in them while they were unconscious, and the third for obvious reasons. My opinion: the best reform of joint and several liability is to limit it to being applied only to defendants who were significantly responsible, say 20% and up, except for employer-employee situations, which should have no such limit.
EDIT: yay posting on the DL while reviewing for torts class.
