I have read up on CP, and the malpractice before. It is mostly based on claims, causing doctors to turn away patients, and just full our retire. I know two OBGYN's that have retired due to their malpractice insurance, and they have never even been sued. I think the percentage of suits brought against OBGYN's is something like 1 in 5? But I may be wrong, I am just not sure of the number. But edwards, has been raping the system for his own personal gain. Ussually these type of lawyers recieve anywhere from 30-40% of the sum awarded, Hence the large amount sought. I feel for people in this situation, but overall these frivelous lawsuits hurt people and the system.

Did 'Junk Science' Make John Edwards Rich?
By Marc Morano
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
January 20, 2004

(CNSNews.com) - The superstar trial lawyer accomplishments of John Edwards, which allowed this former millworker to amass a personal fortune, finance his successful U.S. Senate run in 1998 and catapult himself into the 2004 race for president, may have been partially built on "junk science," according to legal and medical experts who spoke with CNSNews.com .

Edwards, who with a late surge finished second in Monday's Iowa Caucuses, continues to cite one of his most lucrative legal victories as an example of how he would stand up for "the little guy" if elected president.

Edwards became one of America's wealthiest trial lawyers by winning record jury verdicts and settlements in cases alleging that the botched treatment of women in labor and their deliveries caused infants to develop cerebral palsy, a brain disorder that causes motor function impairment and lifelong disability.

Although he was involved in other types of personal injury litigation, Edwards specialized in infant cerebral palsy and brain damage cases during his early days as a trial lawyer and with the Raleigh, N.C., firm of Edwards & Kirby.

Edwards has repeatedly told campaign audiences that he fought on behalf of the common man against the large insurance companies. But a political critic with extensive knowledge of Edwards' legal career in North Carolina told CNSNews.com a different story

"Edwards always helped the little guy as long as he got a million dollars out of it," said the source, who did not want to be identified.

The cause of cerebral palsy has been debated since the 19th century. Some medical studies dating back to at least the 1980s asserted that doctors could do very little to cause cerebral palsy during the birthing process. Two new studies in 2003 further undermined the scientific premise of the high profile court cases that helped Edwards become a multi-millionaire and finance his own successful campaign for the U.S. Senate.

Dr. Murray Goldstein, a neurologist and the medical director of the United Cerebral Palsy Research and Educational Foundation, said it is conceivable for a doctor's incompetence to cause cerebral palsy in an infant. "There are some cases where the brain damage did occur at the time of delivery. But it's really unusual. It's really quite unusual," Goldstein said.

"The overwhelming majority of children that are born with developmental brain damage, the ob/gyn could not have done anything about it, could not have, not at this stage of what we know," Goldstein added.

The medical and legal experts with whom CNSNews.com consulted said each case of cerebral palsy had to be evaluated on its own, but that medical science was increasingly exonerating the doctors involved in the labor and delivery where cerebral palsy resulted.

Eldon L. Boisseau of the Kansas-based firm Turner and Boisseau, specializing in defending doctors' insurance companies from medical malpractice lawsuits, agreed that physician-caused cerebral palsy "occurs only rarely."

"At the end of the day, I verily believe we will find [the cause of cerebral palsy is] all genetic," Boisseau said in an interview with CNSNews.com.

Dr. John Freeman, a professor of neurology and pediatrics at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Md., also believes there is little obstetricians can do to prevent cerebral palsy during delivery. "Most cases of cerebral palsy are not due to asphyxia," Freeman told CNSNews.com.

"A great many of these cases are due to subtle infections of the child before birth," Freeman said. "That is the cause of the premature labor and the cause of the [brain] damage. There is little or no evidence that if you did a [caesarean] section a short time earlier you would prevent cerebral palsy," he added.

'Heart wrenching plea'

But some of Edwards' critics say that as a trial lawyer, he relied more on his verbal skills than the latest scientific evidence to persuade juries that the doctors' mistakes had been instrumental in causing the cerebral palsy in the infants.

Edwards' trial summaries "routinely went beyond a recitation of his case to a heart-wrenching plea to jurors to listen to the unspoken voices of injured children," according to a comprehensive analysis of Edwards' legal career by The Boston Globe in 2003.

The Globe cited an example of Edwards' oratorical skills from a medical malpractice trial in 1985. Edwards had alleged that a doctor and a hospital had been responsible for the cerebral palsy afflicting then-five-year-old Jennifer Campbell.

'I have to tell you right now -- I didn't plan to talk about this -- right now I feel her (Jennifer), I feel her presence,' Edwards told the jury according to court records. "[Jennifer's] inside me and she's talking to you ... And this is what she says to you. She says, 'I don't ask for your pity. What I ask for is your strength. And I don't ask for your sympathy, but I do ask for your courage.'"

Edwards' emotional plea worked. Jennifer Campbell's family won a record jury verdict of $6.5 million against the hospital where the girl was born -- a judgment reduced later to $2.75 million on appeal. Edwards also settled with Jennifer's obstetrician for $1.5 million.

Legal expert Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of the book, The Rule of Lawyers, said Edwards' success in court was due in large part to his mastery of one important trait.

"Edwards was clearly very good at managing the emotional tenor of a trial and that turns out to be at least as important as any particular skill in the sense of researching the fine points of law," Olson told CNSNews.com .

"These are the skills that you find in successful trial lawyers. They can tell a story that produces a certain emotional response. It's a gift," Olson added.

However, Olson believes trial lawyers "have been getting away with an awful lot in cerebral palsy litigation," by excluding certain scientific evidence.

"[Trial lawyers] have been cashing in on cases where the doctor's conduct probably did not make any difference at all -- cases where the child was doomed to this condition based on things that happened before they ever got to the delivery room," Olson said.

'Junk science in the courtroom'

Peter Huber, a lawyer and author of the book, Galileo's Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom, believes juries are typically manipulated with emotional arguments to aid the plaintiff's case.

"The jury sees the undisputed trauma first, the disputed negligence second, the undisputed cerebral palsy third. It is a perfect set-up for misinterpreting sequence as cause," Huber wrote.

According to Boisseau, the growing body of scientific studies showing that obstetricians are generally blameless in cerebral palsy cases has done nothing to alter the trend of multi-million dollar court settlements. Those settlements are reached, Boisseau said, even though "a lot of the plaintiff's expert science is unsupported, essentially junk science."

Many juries never even get to hear about the medical science or the origins of cerebral palsy because "90 percent of suits for obstetrical malpractice are settled" out of court, noted Freeman of Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Huber does not expect cerebral palsy cases to fade away, despite the growing body of scientific evidence exonerating doctors.

"Despite the almost complete absence of scientific basis for these [medical malpractice] claims, cerebral palsy cases remain enormously attractive to lawyers," Huber wrote.

The judgments or settlements related to medical malpractice lawsuits that focused on brain-damaged infants with cerebral palsy helped Edwards amass a personal fortune estimated at between $12.8 and $60 million. He and his wife own three homes, each worth more than $1 million, according to Edwards' Senate financial disclosure forms. Edwards' old law firm reportedly kept between 25 and 40 percent of the jury awards/settlements during the time he worked there.

According to the Center for Public Integrity, Edwards was able to win "more than $152 million" based on his involvement in 63 lawsuits alone. The legal profession recognized Edwards' achievements by inducting him into the prestigious legal society called the Inner Circle of Advocates, which includes the nation's top 100 lawyers. Lawyers Weekly also cited Edwards as one of America's "Lawyers of the Year" in 1996.

'The kids and families I've fought for'

Edwards has shifted his emotionally charged speeches from the jury box to the presidential campaign trail and is fond of re-telling the story of how his firm sued on behalf of a cerebral palsy-afflicted boy named Ethan Bedrick in 1996.

Ethan, born in North Carolina in 1992, allegedly developed cerebral palsy after a botched delivery. Edwards has explained to audiences at presidential campaign rallies that suing Ethan's insurance carrier, Travelers Insurance Co., to cover the boy's physical therapy was necessary because "Ethan's family had no choice.

"[The family was] forced to go to court to get their son the care he needed," Edwards has said of the case, which his law firm won.

Edwards has repeatedly cited Ethan's case as an example of "the kids and families I've fought for," and in the minds of many political observers positioned himself as the classic David against the insurance industry's Goliath.

However, Edwards has also repeatedly failed to mention that he had represented Ethan Bedrick in a lawsuit against the boy's obstetrician a year earlier in 1995. Edwards had alleged that the doctor was negligent in failing to prevent the boy's oxygen deprivation during labor and therefore had caused the boy's cerebral palsy.

Edwards settled the malpractice case with the doctor's insurance company less than three weeks into the trial, enabling Ethan's family to get a reported $5 million for medical and living expenses. The case was reportedly the largest medical malpractice settlement in North Carolina history.

'I'm proud of that'

Edwards is not shy about defending his legal career and says he would gladly put his record up against that of President Bush in this year's general election.

"The time I spent in courtrooms representing kids and families against, you know, big insurance companies and big drug companies and big corporate America -- I'm proud of that," Edwards told the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes in December 2003.

But Edwards' critics have a different view of the man; they say he has repeatedly acted to enrich himself.

"John Edwards' spin is always -- I am helping the little guy. But he screened his cases to the point that he only helped people that were going to make him richer," said the CNSNews.com source with extensive knowledge of Edwards' legal career.

Dr. Lorne Hall, one of the physicians with whom Edwards reached a confidential settlement in a malpractice case involving cerebral palsy, agreed, telling The Charlotte Observer in 2003 that "[Edwards] knows how to pick cases, and he knows the ones he can win."

Hall said Edwards was "very polished, very polite, dressed to the T's, smiling at the ladies." But the anonymous source for this story said Edwards displayed a "belligerent attitude" toward the medical profession.

"He sued nurses, doctors, hospitals. The reputation he had was -- he never wanted to hear that nobody did anything wrong. If you even walked by the door of an alleged malpractice incident, you were gong to cough up money too," the source said.

But John Hood, president of the free-market, Raleigh, N.C.-based John Locke Foundation said Edwards tailored the evidence in his court cases for maximum impact.

"In pursuing his client's cases he did what many other trial lawyers do. He bent the available evidence to fit what he wanted to say," Hood told CNSNews.com . "That is the nature of an advocacy system," Hood added

Hood does not fault Edwards for the strategies he used as a trial lawyer.

"He was an advocate for his clients. It was his job to make the best possible case for them," Hood said.

Many legal observers agree that Edwards was simply doing his job and doing it very well.

A North Carolina newspaper, The News and Observer, said Edwards "forged a reputation as one of the most skilled plaintiff's attorneys in the business."

Retired North Carolina Superior Court Judge Robert Farmer, who heard many of Edwards' arguments in court, had nothing but praise for the abilities of the former trial lawyer, turned senator.

"He was probably the best I ever had in the 21 years I had on the bench. Lawyers would come in to watch him, to see what he does," Farmer told the Chicago Tribune in December 2003.

'Scientifically unfounded'

Olson said lawsuits blaming obstetricians for cerebral palsy and other infant brain damage "may constitute the single biggest branch of medical malpractice litigation." Cerebral palsy is diagnosed in about 8,000 infants annually in the U.S.

But the recent scientific studies may make those lawsuits "scientifically unfounded," Olson explained. He contends that the medical malpractice suits that enabled Edwards and other trial lawyers to become rich and famous are crippling medical specialties like obstetrics, emergency room medicine and neurosurgery.

"A few years ago every neurosurgeon in Washington D.C., had been sued, and it can't be because the nation's capital gets only bad neurosurgeons. It's because it's too tempting to file against the competent ones because so many terrible things go wrong with their patients," Olson added.

Edwards, who opposes legislation that would cap damages in liability lawsuits, would not respond to repeated requests through his campaign offices for comment.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Dick Morris
The Political Life

Look for the dirty laundry in Edwards’s closet

The cheering that surrounds John Kerry’s choice of John Edwards for vice president may fade quickly if the Bush campaign’s negative researchers are on the ball.

Edwards has a real vulnerability in the way he raised campaign money during his abortive presidential bid.

The North Carolina senator and former trial lawyer leaned heavily on his former peers for campaign funding. More than half of his donations came from trial lawyers, and 22 of his top 25 contributions came from his former colleagues at the bar.

While trial lawyers will not win any popularity contests, their support of Edwards, per se, will not do him much harm.

Trial lawyers are no less popular than the oil-company types who fund so much of the Bush campaign. But there is a strong indication that many of these funds may have been contributed illegally.

Trial lawyers are usually quite wealthy men whose firms are often not much more than a collection of secretaries, paralegals and processing personnel.

They sit atop these litigation factories where clerks process cases, computers encode them and low-level attorneys try to settle them out of court. Accustomed to giving large sums to political campaigns, these trial lawyers do not blink at writing six-figure checks for their favorite candidates.

But they are not used to hard-money requirements. Their usual soft-money donations to party committees and the like are easy for them to handle, but donations to a presidential campaign have to be limited to $2,000 per person. And there lies the weakness of the trial bar — finding enough people in their orbits rich enough to give $2,000 to a candidate.

For corporate attorneys, it is not hard to pass the hat around the firm and round up a sizeable sum. But in trial lawyers’ shops, the average clerk cannot usually ante up the funds to donate to a political campaign.

There is evidence that Edwards may have circumvented the campaign-finance law by bundling contributions from law clerks and paralegals who did not actually make the donations from their own funds.

Tab Turner, for example, the eminent Little Rock trial lawyer, donated $200,000 to Edwards’s campaign and his 527 committees. Investigators interviewed the clerks in his firm in whose names many of the donations were made. Slate magazine reported, on Aug. 29, 2003, that “one clerk who gave $2,000 to Edwards said that Turner had ‘asked for people to support Edwards’ and assured them that ‘he would reimburse us.’”

Edwards had to return $10,000 to several Turner employees and attorney Tab claimed that he did not know it was illegal to reimburse his employees for their donations.

One or two illegal contributions will not bring Edwards down, but it is easy to speculate that his donor list may be rife with such tales. The pressure on trial lawyers to come up with funds for the struggling Edwards campaign was intense, and many trial lawyers may have fallen victim to the temptation to use straw donors to make their contributions.

Bush’s negative-research people need to comb through the donor lists and interview each of the contributors to find out how many were putting up their bosses money.

Edwards could blow up in Kerry’s face, just as Geraldine Ferraro did in Walter Mondale’s and Thomas Eagleton did in McGovern’s. People look to the vice-presidential selection as an indicator of what kind of appointments a presidential candidate would make should he win the election. Edwards sends all the right signals — a Southerner, a moderate, a charismatic and caring senator. But should he be tripped up over campaign donations, he could become a big liability very, very quickly.

The Edwards designation opens the door for the Bush negative researchers — and they are really good at exploiting such opportunities. Really good.
http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:RufIVes4LWUJ:www.hillnews.com/morris/070704.aspx+edwards+lawyer+history&hl=en

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Cheney Urges Cap on Malpractice Awards
Proposal Aims to Improve Health Care
By Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 20, 2004; Page A06

Vice President Cheney, with a swipe at his Democratic trial-lawyer counterpart, yesterday blamed rising health care costs on "runaway litigation" and promoted a $250,000 cap on medical malpractice awards as the central tenet of the White House program to improve access, affordability and quality of care.
But it was medical malpractice that dominated his address at the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo, and it is limits on lawsuit damages that remain the most ambitious proposal of the Republican ticket's health care agenda.

"This problem doesn't start in the waiting room," Cheney said in remarks released by the campaign. "It doesn't start in the operating room. The problem starts in the courtroom."

With lawsuits on the rise and multimillion-dollar awards making headlines, physicians and many Republicans say limiting damages is the solution to the broader challenges confronting the U.S. health system. In their analysis, capping damages will lead to lower malpractice premiums, which will reduce doctors' use of unnecessary tests and procedures, known as defensive medicine. Those improvements will result in better care at a lower cost, enabling more people to buy coverage, they say.

"When it comes to the legal crisis in American health care, the Kerry-Edwards ticket is on the side of personal-injury trial lawyers, and the Bush-Cheney ticket is on the side of doctors and patients," Cheney said, noting that Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) "is a trial lawyer who is very experienced at suing doctors."

Strategically, the Bush team has decided to spotlight tort reform because "most people in this country have some form of insurance, and they're worried about how much it costs," said senior strategist Matthew Dowd.

A report by the Department of Health and Human Services found that expenses traceable to legal liability fears contribute between $60 billion and $108 billion a year to the total $1.6 trillion health care bill. Legislation imposing a $250,000 cap on non-economic damages would result in 4 million more people receiving health insurance, according to Congress's Joint Economic Committee.

"The broken medical liability system has a great impact on access to care and what happens to a patient who can't find a physician in his or her hour of need," said Donald Palmisano, the immediate past president of the American Medical Association, which supports the bill. He said veteran doctors in specialty areas such as obstetrics and neurosurgery are retiring, and a recent survey of physicians found that up to 70 percent order tests or procedures in case they are sued.

An analysis by the Congressional Budget Office said the malpractice bill would benefit physicians and the government but would reduce private health insurance premiums a scant 0.4 percent.

"The Bush administration largely gets it backwards," said Columbia University law professor and physician William M. Sage. "They say health care is expensive because of lawsuits. I say lawsuits are expensive because of our health care system."

Edwards and Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) have consistently voted against limits on damage awards, arguing that malpractice suits have little impact on health spending but remain an important option for patients severely injured by medical errors.

"Senator Kerry and I stand with families and kids as we always have and as we believe it's important for the president and the vice president to do, instead of being on the side of insurance companies and big drug companies, which is, unfortunately, where they are," Edwards said during a campaign stop in North Carolina.

Behind the rhetorical sparring is a real problem that is not being addressed, said several legal and medical experts.

"The solution that organized medicine and the White House are supporting is a fix for the doctors to some degree," said Martin J. Hatlie, president of the Chicago-based Partnership for Patient Safety, which advises hospitals on safety improvements. "It helps keep their premiums down. It does nothing to advance the quality of care, nothing to advance the safety of care, nothing to more fairly compensate claimants or address the other really significant problems in the current medical-legal system."

Sage is advocating changes to the Medicare and Medicaid programs to link liability costs and reimbursement rates. Under his voluntary system, the government would offer financial incentives to hospitals that institute speedy resolution of medical errors. Doctors and hospitals would be protected from huge lawsuits if they promptly notified patients of mistakes and offered adequate compensation.

During the Democratic primaries, Kerry unveiled his ideas for medical malpractice, which would shift largely to a mediation system and sanctions against lawyers with a history of frivolous lawsuits.

Do you know how lawyers like John Edwards choose their malpractice cases? It goes something like this: A patient thinks that he has been harmed or was given substandard care. He writes a letter to a malpractice attorney stating the case.

The attorney decides whether or not it is worthwhile to pursue the case. Worthwhile = amount of money that can possibly be won.

Malpractice attorneys claim that their actions PROTECT patients.

Yet those attorneys decide, almost universally, which cases merit attention based on the possible monetary awards that can be garned, regardless of the merits of the case or whether or not there is actual malpractice involved. Truth is, the biggest awards are doled out in cases that are neither black nor white (so jurors will not be swayed by facts but by emotional appeals such as "channeling" fetuses); or, in cases where the emotional appeal of the defendent is such that it will outweigh the facts.

Unless true medical malpractice fortuitously intersects with the attorney's assessment of the possible $$ rewards of the case, this "system" of patient protection never gets involved in the case.

This "system" is neither efficient at uncovering malpractice, nor does it provide consistent, proven methods of remediation other than cash payments to the defendent and lawyer.

Worse, the manifold ways this ineffective "patient protection system" increases health care costs are intolerable in a time when citizens are getting ready to hand over health care to government rather than foot the bill themselves.

Liability lawyers have been effective in preserving their cash cow partly by tendentious statistics and studies that pretend to prove that their services don't actually raise health care costs.

Well, now, experience is proving them wrong. Texas is showing conclusively that caps on noneconomic damages work.

A process whose purpose is to protect patients and weed out bad medical practice cannot have, as it's major selection crterion, how much money a lawyer can extort from an insurance company or wheedle from a jury.

Summary: Now that Senator John Kerry has named Senator John Edwards as his vice-presidential running mate, we need to examine the reality behind the images that both men have projected.

[www.CapitalismMagazine.com] Now that Senator John Kerry has named Senator John Edwards as his vice-presidential running mate, we need to examine the reality behind the images that both men have projected.

Senator Kerry has been busy posing for the media shooting guns, playing hockey, declaring himself as having "conservative" values, and even saying that life begins at conception. The point of all this is to counter any attempt to depict him as a limousine liberal, out of touch with the values of mainstream Americans.

It is an insult to our intelligence to act as if posing with guns is as significant as how the Senator has voted on gun control laws during his 16 years in Congress. It is an insult to our intelligence to claim conservative values when both liberal and non-partisan organizations have rated John Kerry's voting record as the most liberal in the Senate, more liberal even than Ted Kennedy's.

The political packaging of Senator Kerry's personal military record in Vietnam in the 1970s is far less important than how he has repeatedly voted in the Senate since then to cut military spending and to cut spending for the intelligence services.

People who will vote for candidates on the basis of election-year images, rather than bothering to find out the facts, perhaps deserve whatever officials they elect. But, when you are electing a President of the United States especially, you are electing someone whose actions will affect generations yet unborn -- who have no vote, but who deserve something better than someone with a well-contrived media image.

Selecting Senator John Edwards as a vice-presidential running mate was more image-making. Senator Edwards has had few, if any, achievements during his one term in the United States Senate, and savvy political observers question whether he would have been re-elected if he had decided to run again for the Senate. But he brings more image -- a more lively and engaging image -- to spice up John Kerry's dullness with his own more gushing sparkle.

Just as Senator Kerry's long-ago military tour of duty in Vietnam is exploited politically today, so Senator Edwards' working class origins are being similarly exploited. But John Edwards has long since grown rich as a lawyer suing for millions of dollars in medical malpractice lawsuits.

Edwards' specialty was suing when babies were born with brain defects, which he -- like other lawyers cashing in on junk science and gullible juries -- blamed on the failure of doctors to have had those babies delivered by Caesarian section.

Since then, Caesarian operations have increased greatly, but without reducing those birth defects that Edwards and others had blamed on a lack of Caesarian deliveries. Studies validated by leading medical authorities, here and overseas, have found no such link between birth defects and a lack of Caesarian births.

Meanwhile, lawyers like John Edwards could laugh all the way to the bank.

Like so many liberals who talk about "bringing down the cost of health care," John Edwards has in fact been driving up the cost of medical treatment. "Defensive medicine," such as unnecessary Caesarian operations, is not cheap. Defensive medicine protects doctors from slick lawyers far more than it protects patients.

Senator Edwards has already shown the same blithe disregard for facts as a politician that he showed as a lawyer. He has used the old liberal claim of "hunger in America" during this year's primary campaign, even though studies show no such thing -- and in fact show obesity to be more common in the lower income brackets.

"Hunger in America" claims were once big stuff in the media but hard facts have long since shot down this contrived alarm. John Edwards must know that "hunger in America" claims are bunk, but he obviously doesn't care.