News Room
Sick of Lawsuits? You Should Be!

www.SickofLawsuits.org Health Hazard Alert:
This Week's Personal Injury Lawyer Conference Hazardous to Your Health

July 25, 2005 - Toronto - This week personal injury lawyers flock to Toronto for the American Trial Lawyers Association (ATLA) conference where they will plot even more attacks on our healthcare system. Sound outrageous? A look at ATLA's group meeting agenda reveals that more than 50 percent of the meetings target our healthcare system. If you think that is a tough number to swallow, try not to choke on these:

  • $845: Yearly cost of the tort system each American must pay (U.S. Tort Costs: 2004 Update, Tillinghast-Towers Perrin, January 2005)
  • $40 billion: amount of money trial lawyers earned from lawsuit awards in 2002 (Trial Lawyers Inc.; A Report On the Lawsuit Industry in America, The Center for Legal Policy, Manhattan Institute, 2003)
  • $70 - 126 billion: amount of healthcare costs per year that would be saved by limiting unreasonable jury awards (Going without Health Insurance, Families USA, March 10, 2003; "Number of Uninsured Americans on the Rise," Associated Press, March 5, 2003; "Avoiding Health Insurance Crowd-Out," Journal of Health Economics, March 2000)
  • 79: Percentage of doctors who report that due to litigation fears, they have ordered more tests than they would based only on professional judgment of what is medically needed (Fear of Litigation Study: Impact on Medicine, Harris Interactive, April 11, 2002)

Some unscrupulous personal injury lawyers use questionable tactics and junk science to game the legal system for personal profit. These abusive lawsuits threaten the access to and the affordability of healthcare for all and discourage medical innovation. Ultimately, lawsuit abuse hurts patients.

Don't let personal injury lawyers reduce our healthcare to only a can of chicken soup. Join Sick of Lawsuits and learn what you can do to put an end to frivolous healthcare litigation. Visit www.sickoflawsuits.org.

Sick of Lawsuits is a nonpartisan, grassroots campaign of Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse. We have more than 165,000 supporters across the country including doctors, healthcare professionals, small business owners, attorneys and people from every walk of life.