Mississippi's tort reform, passed in 2004, has helped reduce medical malpractice claims by as much as 90 percent.
Reform booster Dr. Kenneth Stubbs believes that more can be done statewide and nationwide.
“We need to see tort reform across the board, and unless there is uniform tort reform, there will never be a complete impact,” said Stubbs, who won the Natchezian of the Year award in 2008 for his tort reform efforts. “The whole nation must subscribe to this.”
Gov. Haley Barbour called pre-reform Mississippi the “judicial hellhole for jackpot jury verdicts.” The hellhole within the hellhole was Jefferson County, where a pharmacist was named in more than 1,000 lawsuits. In one case, a Jefferson County jury awarded $1 billion to the family of a woman who had taken the drug Pondimin, a weight loss remedy known as fen-phen that is now off the market.
Five years ago, Mississippi legislators put a $500,000 cap on pain and suffering or non-economic damage awards in medical malpractice cases. Stubbs laments that the change has gone unheralded.
“When the Federal government talks about tort reform, they never say what happened in Mississippi. The national leaders never mention we’ve reformed our laws,” Stubbs said. “I don’t know why our federal politicians haven’t thrown our name in the hat as a state that has amended our laws.”
Many in the medical field believe that Mississippi's old reputation for litigiousness still keeps doctors away.
“When you talk to residents and students at distant medical schools, they don’t want to come to Mississippi, and part of what they mention is tort reform,” Stubbs said. “You tell (the students) about the tort reform legislation, but the preconceived notion is, ‘Mississippi is a bad tort reform state, and you’re still the poorest state in the union. I don’t want to go there.’”
A recent Congressional Budget Office analysis concludes tort reform lowers health care expenditures, and that a national tort reform package would reduce national health care spending by about 0.5 percent, or $11 billion in 2009.
Stubbs is feverishly promoting a national tort reform package
