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Perry's 'loser pays' is an economic winner
Mr. Perry made passage of a modified version of the English loser-pays rule a top priority during this year's biennial session of the Texas Legislature. After emphasizing the need for such tort reform during his State of the State address in February, Mr. Perry made loser pays the law of the land in Texas by signing H.B. 274 in May.This is not the first time Mr. Perry has tackled necessary pro-growth tort reform. The implementation of loser pays in Texas comes on the heels of Mr. Perry's landmark 2003 medical liability reforms, which established a burden of proof for punitive damages similar to criminal law by requiring a unanimous jury verdict and capped noneconomic damages at $750,000. A 2008 report by the Perryman Group found those reforms to be directly responsible for an immediate first-year influx of almost 2,000 new physicians into Texas as well as a 70 percent drop in lawsuits against hospitals. The Texas Public Policy Foundation estimates that the state has netted more than 25,000 doctors since. Following the 2003 reforms, Texas doctors saw medical liability insurance rates decline by an average of more than 21 percent, with some seeing nearly a 50 percent rate cut. Those savings enabled hospitals to expand charity care by 24 percent. Three years after these lawsuit reforms, Texas became the first state ever to be removed from the American Medical Association's list of states experiencing a liability crisis. And 25,000 Trial Lawyers moved to California Posted by: GolfBravoUSMC 2011-09-02 |
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