Word: paines
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...McDonough went into the hospital in 1997 to have a calcified growth, which the doctor said could be cancerous, removed from his neck. Two days later he awoke to find himself paralyzed from the chest down. Still in the intensive-care unit, he felt strangled by a noose of pain and needed three excruciating gasps of air to cry for help. "I was crushed," says McDonough, 69, a former weapons-plant inspector from Littleton, Colo. He once loved to fish and dreamed of restoring his ideal car: a 1965 Chrysler. But he soon realized that he could do neither...
McDonough is a victim again, this time of the move to cap jury awards. Colorado is one of the few states that limit jury awards of both economic damages (say, for lost income) and noneconomic ones (for pain and suffering). Judge Warren Martin, now retired, cut McDonough's award to $1.33 million, concluding that although his injuries merited an exception to the $1 million cap, the jury had gone too far. (Colorado's caps limit economic damages to $750,000 and pain-and-suffering awards to $250,000. The former can be increased if a plaintiff shows future economic loss...
...billion since 1995, and its reserves for estimated future claims are underfunded by about $4.6 billion. So if insurers aren't profiting from higher premiums, who is? Zuk and his peers point to trial lawyers and frivolous claimants. Insurers are lobbying alongside doctors for caps on noneconomic damages (for pain and suffering), like the ones in California and 18 other states. Rising awards, Zuk says, are bleeding money out of the system and forcing insurers to raise premiums. Cap the damages, and premiums will fall in line, he says...
...effort to come up with a national version of her state's malpractice law. California allows unlimited amounts to be awarded for the economic damages a patient suffers as a result of a doctor's error, such as lost wages and medical bills, but caps noneconomic awards for pain and suffering at $250,000. The cap works, Feinstein believes. Nationwide, doctors' insurance premiums grew 420% from 1975 to 2001, while California's premiums, she says, are up only 168%. (Some experts credit the lower premiums to insurance reforms the state also adopted...
...like a bandage on a mortal wound. Placing limits on discretionary "noneconomic" damages may stem today's bleeding and is certainly one element of controlling costs--$1 million to a plaintiff is $1 million less to take care of the rest of us. But merely putting caps on pain-and-suffering damages will not restore reliability or trust...