False alarm: how the media helps the insurance industry and the GOP promote the myth of America’s “lawsuit crisis.”
Last December, Newsweek featured a cover package by Stuart Taylor and Evan Thomas that blared: “Lawsuit Hell: Doctors. Teachers. Coaches. Ministers. They all share a common fear: being sued on the job.” Paired with a weeklong tie-in on NBC News and online chats on MSNBC.com, the article claimed that because “Americans will sue each other at the slightest provocation,” the country is suffering from an “onslaught of litigation” that costs Americans $200 billion a year. The story was full of tales claiming to illustrate Americans’ overarching sense of legal entitlement and desire to “win a jackpot from a system that allows sympathetic juries to award plaintiffs not just real damages … but millions more for the impossible-to-measure ‘pain and suffering’ and highly arbitrary ‘punitive damages.’”
Among others, the story featured a softball tournament organizer, a minister, and a doctor who all claimed to have modified their behavior because they were terrified of lawsuits. Ryan Warner, an insurance salesman in Page, Ariz., told Newsweek that he had recently, cancelled an annual charity softball tournament because an injured player had sued the city of Page for $100,000. Warner said that he worried he might be added as a defendant.
“The story as published, though, lacks a few critical details. Newsweek didn’t mention, for instance, that the 1997 federal Volunteer Protection Act ensures that people like Warner are immunized from these types of lawsuits. The article also excluded the injured man, Richard Sawyer, a locomotive engineer who suffered a dislocated ankle and a spiral fracture to the fibula–and missed months of work as a result–after he slid into a base that was supposed to break away on impact but didn’t because the city hadn’t followed the manufacturer’s instructions for maintaining these fixtures properly, according to Kevin Garrison, Sawyer’s lawyer.