Car Accidents, Personal Injury and Tort Reform

Not only must Georgia car accident, truck accident, and other personal injury victims fight the insurance companies to get a fair shake, but now days they must also swim against the tide of so-called “tort reform.” Brainwashed by propaganda, bought and paid for by the most dangerous industries and their insurers, potential jurors naturally come into court believing that all injured litigants are exaggerating – or worse. Sadly, we taxpayers often end up paying the medical and other bills that the wantonly, careless and dangerous today escape having to pay, thanks to “tort reform.” As an example, insurance companies recently tried to deny workers compensation benefits to the dependants of undocumented hispanic workers who were killed or seriously injured on-the-job. Fortunately, the Georgia Court of Appeals did not buy their arguments and recognized that it as another attempt for insurance companies who received a premium for the coverage, to shift the financial responsibility to state and federal government and taxpayers.
Car accidents and other personal injury victims normally require expensive healthcare, and lose pay checks while unable to work. If the insurer for the careless driver, dangerous company, defective product manufacturer or other “injury-causer” is not held liable for the injury, then the victim likely will have no choice but to let Medicaid pick up the healthcare tab, and let the Social Security system pay disability benefits to replace earnings. The bottom line is that either the “injury causer” pays, or you and I do. Another reality, unknown to most of the public, is that juries are kept in the dark about insurance companies’ involvement in almost all personal injury trials. Even though an insurer actually is behind the entire fight in almost all personal injury cases – paying for the defense lawyer and any judgment ultimately collected – the jurors never are told this in a typical personal injury trial. Furthermore, the injured person has to sue the actual “injury causer” himself, and not his insurance company. In actuality, insurance companies are intimately involved in all litigation, including selection and hiring “expert witnesses”, including physicians, to testify and give favorable “expert opinions”at trial. Most Georgia attorneys who handle personal injury, workers compensation and serious injury cases recognize the names of these “hired guns” because insurance companies use them over and over. Many of the “experts” earn a substantial part of their annual income doing nothing but “independent” medical examinations and then testifying.
We believe it is time for the public to learn the truth about these issues that is based upon hard evidence – data that is not the propaganda of those with a financial interest in not paying just claims. Along those lines, one article that appears to be an extensive and well documented resource on the truth about “tort reform” is “The Frivolous Case for Tort Law Change,” published in May of 2005 by the Economic Policy Institute. In it are many other resources documenting this simple fact: “Tort reform” clearly is a very elaborate, and successful, propaganda war being waged by those who either have political agendas and aspirations and those with a financial interest in not paying the claims of innocent people who have been injured and damaged by the negligence of others.