Med Mal in Illinois - Can We Finally Get Some Honest Reporting?

Cross posted from The Pop Tort by Joe Consumer

So you have a situation where the cyclical insurance market has stabilized medical malpractice insurance rates everywhere in the country irrespective of whether a state has passed “caps”, and where Illinois is a prime example of an insurance market stabilzing for reasons  having nothing to do with the legal system (and here) – yet where the state took the horrendous step of enacting unconstitutional caps that have already been struck down.

And you still have incredibly biased reporting by newspapers, like here, reporting on the “return” of a neurosurgeon to Belleville IL not because of so-called “tort reform,” but because the hospital decided to “offer to cover his malpractice insurance through its self-insurance program”. Well, yeh.

Unlike how this reporter characterizes our views, which he attributes to lawyers (“In response, plaintiff lawyers labeled the malpractice "crisis" little more than a public relations gimmick”), our position on this was never that there wasn’t a crisis. There was always an insurance crisis - insurers created it as they  periodically do, they were price-gouging doctors, and that rates would stabilize, like they always do, whether or not caps were enacted.  And that the only way to solve insurance crises is better regulation of this out of control industry.

Oh and by the way, the article also says “Physician groups blamed the high costs on plaintiff attorneys, whom they accused of filing too many 'frivolous' lawsuits, and on plaintiff-friendly juries.” Yeh, well, aside from that fact that there was never any evidence of this, what's changed?  Nothing. The cruel cap was almost immediately struck down again!

Can we get a ever get honest, thoughtful reporting about this issue from our newspaper friends in Belleville?