Tort Reform

"You can have affordable health care and a good environment for jobs. Or you can have rich trial lawyers filing frivolous lawsuits. Not both." - Newt Gingrich

The biggest obstacle to real tort reform in North Carolina is that the trial lawyers, a wealthy special interest group, has the Democratic Party in their pocket. The result is that we have a system which promotes getting lawyers rich instead of providing affordable health care. Increasing insurance premiums are driving good doctors out of business and frivolous lawsuits are clogging our courts - which slows down justice for those who need it most. The doctors that do remain in business must pass those costs onto the patients making health care extremely expensive, out of reach for many residents of North Carolina. Businesses are also suffering worker compensation lawsuits that prevent them from expanding and lower economic

Additionally, lawsuit abuse is also hurting job creation in North Carolina - many business owners are so afraid of legal liability they won't expand operations to create new jobs. The American Medical Association estimates that the costs of defensive medicine to be between $70-126 billion per year. The only people who benefit from this system are a narrow group of highly compensated lawyers who are playing our legal system like the stock market. Governor Rick Perry in Texas calls this "jackpot justice." It's wrong and I'm going to keep fighting it.

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• "The current system of litigation is too expensive for America, fails to provide justice for Americans and is being made steadily worse and more expensive by increasingly predatory trial lawyers who have more and more resources devoted to gaming the system to enrich themselves at the expense of individual Americans and American society. This is especially true in the healthcare system. Doctors are more important to our nation's health care system than trial lawyers. In order to ensure the availability of doctors it is important to create and/or maintain hard caps on non-economic damages in medical liability cases." - Newt Gingrich
• "The costs of litigation per person in the United States are far higher than in any other major industrialized nation in the world" This explosion in litigation is creating a logjam in America 's civil courts and threatening jobs across America. Small businesses spend, on average, about $150,000 per year on litigation expenses.- Learn more about the President's position on medical liability reform here.