Caps Gone Wild: Nursing home and liability insurance
During the tort reform fight, nursing home operators, their lobbyists and the insurance industry begged for damage caps based primarily on the notion that it would enable them to afford liability insurance and give them a ceiling and a floor on damages. It also protected them from "jackpot justice" and irresponsible juries.
But it appears now that a number of nursing homes aren't carrying sufficient liability insurance even to compensate vulnerable elderly victims or their families up to the $500,000 damage cap. Their strategy is to be underinsured and if the verdict is too large, take bancruptcy.
The House passed House Bill 536 with Republican support. But it's being killed in the state Senate. Why? Because the nursing home operators, their lobbyists and the insurance industry — some of which supplies some nursing homes with so-called "eroding" policies that really screw nursing home abuse victims by taking the nursing home's legal fees out of the available liability insurance — are leading the Senate leadership around like obedient lap dogs.
Will Sen. Buck Clarke pocket veto the bill? We'll see.
Sid Salter Blog
2/26/10
Posted February 26, 2010 - 12:31 pm
Friday, September 3, 2010
With all due respect to Sid, what? What does insurance for nursing homes have to do with tort reform?
Looked the bill up and that HB is for codes 43-11-7 and 43-11-9. Title 43 is Public Welfare and Chapter 11 is institute for aged and infirmed. 7 and 9 are for licensings and fees. Ok, now we know what laws the bill is trying to change.
If Sid would look all the way back to 2002, HB 2 added a definition of “medical records” and stipulated that medical records held by nursing homes are confidential but must be disclosed to nursing home residents or their representatives or healthcare providers. Didn’t have a thing to do with nursing homes carrying or not carrying insurance. Checked other tort reform bills and they didn’t have anything to do with nursing homes carrying or not carrying insurance either.
Again, with repect, Sid, that statement is related to tort reform how? Can understand if he’s upset because someone might be wronged, they may have sued nursing home and not gotten any money. If a bunch of attys are filing lawsuits and not getting money, then I can see where they might introduce this bill.
Unless I’ve been asleep for the last 10 years, I sure dont remember any tort reformer shouting---and make sure nursing homes do/do not have insurance!
Whether I agree or disagree with Sid, most of the times he’s working off good info. But this one doesn’t make any sence. I think maybe someone has misinformed Mr. Sid.