Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, famously said on the eve of the vote for Obamacare: “To find out what’s in the bill, we’ll have to pass the bill”

Well Ms Pelosi, we know what is not in the bill: Any real attempt to get the legal industry’s snouts out of the country’s multi hundred billion dollar medical care system. Because of this and other failures to reform skyrocketing costs of healthcare, Americans are starting to reject Obamacare. See story

The trial lawyer lobby, which is a stalwart supporter and funder of the Democrat party, made sure no real tort reform would be contained in Obamacare. The Heritage Foundation wrote a revealing article on this unnecessary burden by tort lawyers…and the fear of tort lawyers who increase the cost of healthcare by at least 200 billion per year See article

One of the highest profile lawyers who has preyed on the healthcare industry in the past, is Democrat Senator and presidential contender John Edwards. Yesterday Edwards announced he is opening up his law practice to resume his lucrative career of suing healthcare, after taking a hiatus for his political ambitions. See USA Today

After suffering national scandal for an affair and an out of wedlock child while his wife was suffering from cancer, Edwards evidently missed the percs the income from his malpractice lawsuits brought him in the past…Such as a 30,000 square foot mansion and all of the attendant wealth that lifestyle brings.

At the core of John Edwards extravagant wealth and lifestyle, has been his ability to successfully convince gullible juries that a medical misstep, an honest mistake, or really nothing at all, by a doctor or hospital, is enough to reward his plaintiffs tens of millions of dollars.

Edwards’s courtroom antics went as far as to dramatize the events at birth by speaking to jurors as if he were the unborn baby, begging for help, begging to be let out of the womb. One of those cases saw him hit the jackpot for 23 million See Washington Times story

But the dirty little secret behind Edwards and others like him, is that all Americans subsidize their wealth.

Of course tort lawyers like John Edwards can claim they do a lot of good by weeding out incompetence and dangerous medical practices. But many in the healthcare industry dispute that and claim they do great harm to healthcare.

In reality, if the designers of Obamacare were serious about checking runaway healthcare costs, their main target would have been the revamp of the medical malpractice tort system at all levels.

Easy to understand changes could have been incorporated into Obamacare to stop the abuse of the system; such as creating medical/legal boards with the ability to suspend healthcare providers personally found to be incompetent or dangerous. These same boards could be responsible for awarding damages to victims of medical malpractice, without going through lawsuits and the resultant out of proportion judgments.

Make it easier to fine/imprison CEO’s and directors of pharmaceutical, medical device companies who market products that harm the public, or do not do the job they promise. Make responsibility and punishment personal, instead of impersonal.

With a few changes and safeguards in place, malpractice suits could easily be capped by what regional medical/legal boards decide to be the real costs of damages.

But none of these reforms are in Obamacare and lawyers like John Edwards will take advantage of that fact, as we are all forced to pay the exorbitant costs of medical care that are baked into the Obamacare cake.

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Ed Farnan is the conservative columnist at IrishCentral, where he has been writing on the need for energy independence, strong self defense, secure borders, 2nd amendment, smaller government and many other issues. His articles appear in many publications throughout the USA and world. He has been a guest on Fox News and a regular guest on radio stations in the US and Europe.