Obamacare's Gifts to Lawyers

Rowan Scarborough goes over details of the gifts both by the absence of certain things and the presence of others. First, under absence:

The biggest gift of all is what is not in the bill.

There is no tort reform, no limits to malpractice law suits that drive up medical and insurance costs and force insecure physicians to order excessive tests.

There are no caps on what state juries can award in medical malpractice cases for economic lost, or for the hard-to-calculate pain and suffering. This means lawyers hold on to their free rein in suing doctors and medical plans.

To Democrats, no tort reform makes good politics. The Washington Examiner reports trial lawyers have donated three-quarters of a billion dollars to political campaigns the past two decades -- the vast, vast amount of which went to Democrats and their party. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, has gotten $54,000 in campaign funds this year alone from trial lawyers and their employees.

Conservatives and Republicans have been calling for tort reform for years, so this is just one more example of the lack of bi-partisanship in this atrocity. BTW, Barack and Michelle Obama are both lawyers. Here are some of the "gifts" which will provide the trial lawyers with new opportunities to bring cases:

According to a Republican analysis, here are the legislative gifts to trial lawyers:

• Section 151. Imposes new mandates on insurance companies and the employers who buy their plans, providing lawyers new grounds to sue in federal court.

• Section 153. Establishes a new whistleblower law so the employees of insurance companies can file suit if they believe they were retaliated against. In theory, a person fired for incompetence could retaliate against the company by claiming whistleblower status.

"If some one gets demoted they can claim they were about to bring a complaint," said a Republican congressional staffer. "It gives them another ground to sue a company."

• Section 132. Sets up an appeal process for a patient denied a claim or benefit by an insurance company. The third-party independent arbiter would hear the appeal and issue a ruling.

H/T Red State.