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This year the insurance industry and its allies in Congress are pushing new laws to cut off access to the justice system for innocent victims of medical malpractice. Legislators friendly to the insurance industry have proposed unfair and arbitrary limits (called caps) on damages for all victims, regardless of how severe the injury or how bad the mistake.
These arbitrary caps won’t help doctors and they won't help you – they're designed solely to raise profits for the insurance industry. Even in states that already have caps in place, insurance companies continue to raise doctors' malpractice insurance premiums. The companies say that there's a "crisis" of medical malpractice lawsuits, even though the number of such cases has decreased nationally. The real malpractice crisis is that more than 100,000 innocent people die every year from preventable medical errors; limiting victims' access to justice is hardly a solution.
Every victim of medical errors or negligence deserves the right to justice in a court of law. We should let the justice system, not the insurance industry, decide what's fair compensation for a paralyzed child who'll never play sports, a senior citizen whose golden years are cut short, or a parent who can no longer have children. Should these tragedies be ignored because insurance companies want to make more money?
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