Also, your statement that "we'd wind up suing insurance companies..." doesn't address the issue of disassociating risk and responsibility that I made in my post. This is a cultural (values- and norms-based) problem that will not be solved by capping settlements (see the Barrel for more). To an increasing degree, I sense that in our society that if a mistake is made -- even an honest one that may be associated with routine risk-taking -- the person who falls "victim" to the mistake demands compensation and/or "retribution" (cf. the Gibb family following the death of Maurice).

Whatever happened to those bumper stickers that said "shit happens"? That is actually a pretty good slogan for the champions of tort reform.

I am also disheartened to see the word "we'd" in the aforementioned sentence. Hopefully you're not including yourself in the class of "frivolous lawsuers..." (although you could get me on a technicality here given that I claimed to never have heard "frivolous" used to describe a specific malpractice case).

And in terms of "frivolous" malpractice cases, I could envision there being some SPECIFIC cases so labelled, most likely to be found in the field of cosmetic surgery ("the surgeon didn't make me look pretty enough"). I would like an example of a SPECIFIC malpractice case (outside of plastic surgery) that has widely been considered "frivolous." (Like I had said, I think Kinsley tries to tie malpractice cases with the most idiotic lawsuits to spin his argument to cover all tort reform.)

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