Reply #20: Don't punish people who have valid claims. Punish the LAWYERS for

[AP]

bringing claims that didn't succeed. If a lawyer brings three frivolous claims, remove their license to bring medical malpractice claims.

The problem with limiting awards is two-fold:

1) You can't leave individuals bearing the burden of uncompensated loss and damages. If someon has damages of 1,000,000 dollars, who do you benefit by giving them 300,000 in damages? That uncompensated damage of 700,000 doesn't disappear. When a person runs out of money to take care of themselves, and they can't work to make more money, they go on public assisstance, which the taxpayer pays. In other words, you shift the risk of loss from insurance companies to taxpayers when you cap damage awards. Someone always pays for uncompensated loss. Caps just make sure it isn't private, for-profit insurance companies who do the paying.

2) One of the reasons punitive damage awards are going up is because of the fact that the insurance and health care industry is getting bigger. A 10K dollar punitive damage award against a 1 billion dollar company isn't going to convince them to change their ways. But a 1 million dollar punitive award probably will. Big American businesses can't have their cake and eat it too. They can't merge and monopolize and buy legislation that allows them to become billion dollar industries and then turn around and say that million dollar awards meant to make them change their actions are unreasonable. They'd be unreasonable if they were a million dollar business. But a big punitive damage award is not that unreasonable if the defendant is a huge businesses.