In the US, John Edwards has been exposed as an ambitious charlatan, a populist who carefully crafted a public image that was far from the truth. The public focus has been recently upon his personal life. However, as David Bahnsen argues the damage he has done in his public life and professional career has been far greater.
Edwards managed to do the impossible in his legal career, and by impossible, I mean that he made most plaintiff’s trial lawyers look respectable by comparison.
No case was too frivolous for the Carolinian wonder boy, and no case was unwinnable either. He beat down doctors to a point of humiliating submission, and singlehandedly changed malpractice premium costs for an entire region of the country. Medical malpractice cases are a complex thing, I suppose, and I am not sure it is possible to prove my case, but I would propose to you that John Edwards legal war against doctors has to have cost lives over the years, and almost certainly has cost tremendous amounts of suffering and pain (for patients, or as John calls them, “the little guy”).
How could this be, you wonder? Wasn’t he just a knight in shining armor taking on an evil medical industry that refused to look out for the little guy? No. Not in the slightest bit. What he did was sue the American Red Cross repeatedly because some blood transfusions went wrong (a tragic freak accident, yes, but a tort, hardly).
What he did was put the fear of God in every doctor’s mind in his part of the world that if they slightly over-prescribed (or under-prescribed) a treatment, he would ruin their lives. Treatments that should have been recommended were inevitably avoided because of the threat of John the Dirtbag coming after them.
He carved out an impressive niche in tragic cerebral palsy cases, forcing obstetricians and their insurance carriers to settle cases (for huge dollar amounts) to avoid highly dubious accusations that an action (or inaction) on their part led to cerebral palsy in the cases of various infants. How any member of the medical profession ever voted for this wretch of a human being is beyond me.
At some point in John’s career he realized that ruining doctor’s lives to enrich himself had hit a ceiling, and he now had to turn his guns on a different classification of victim – one in which torts could really hit high numbers: product liability cases.
So he put companies out of business over freak home accidents and pocketed multi-million dollar fees every step of the way. He was notorious for the most contemptible behavior imaginable in the courtroom including claiming that deceased family members of his clients were inside his body talking through him. Like I said, a real piece of work.
As an aside, but not unrelated--virtually to a man, tort lawyers in the US support the Democratic party, and pony up significant donations to prove it. Consequently, the Democratic political machine assiduously protects the interests of tort lawyers, refusing to reform the corrupt and immoral US tort system.
It is noteworthy that in the 2,000 page Democratic House Health Bill and in the 3,000 page Democratic Senate Health Bill conspicuous by its absence is any attempt at medical tort reform. We know why.
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