Jackpot Justice: The True Cost of America’s Tort System
Source: Pacific Research Institute
From press release:

America’s out-of-control legal system imposes a staggering economic cost of over $865 billion every year according to a new scholarly study released today by the Pacific Research Institute (PRI) a free-market think tank based in San Francisco, California. This figure is 27 times more than the federal government spends on homeland security, 30 times what the National Institutes of Health dedicate to finding cures for deadly diseases, and 13 times the amount the U.S. Department of Education spends to help educate America’s children.

The authors of Jackpot Justice: The True Cost of America’s Tort System calculated that the nation’s tort system imposes a yearly “tort tax” of $9,827 for a family of four and raises health care spending in the U.S. by $124 billion.

The new PRI study provides the most comprehensive examination ever of U.S. tort costs. According to the study’s lead author, Dr. Lawrence J. McQuillan, unlike previous studies, Jackpot Justice calculates both the direct and indirect costs of America’s legal system.

These include not just the direct cost of annual damage awards, plaintiffs’ attorney fees, defense costs, and administrative costs from torts but also the indirect cost of the legal system’s impact on research and development spending, the cost of defensive medicine, the related rise in health care spending and reduced access to health care, and the loss of output resulting from deaths due to excess liability.

+ Full Report (PDF; 743 KB)
+ Fact Sheet (PDF; 233 KB)
+ Test Your Tort Literacy (Flash)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 at 10:26 am and is filed under Health and healthcare, Legal and law enforcement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.