Your Legislative Strategy Lesson For the Day: Don’t Get Cute

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Here in California we have a law called MICRA that caps payouts for pain and suffering in medical malpractice cases. I’m no big fan of laws like this, but let’s set that aside for the moment. There’s something I’ve always wondered about MICRA: it sets the payout cap at $250,000, and it’s not indexed for inflation. How did that happen? I mean, this law was passed in 1975, when inflation was practically a national obsession (remember all those WIN buttons?). It was obvious the cap would get whittled away to nothing before long, and sure enough, that’s exactly what’s happened. The cap today is less than a quarter of its value in 1975, making it so low that it’s nearly impossible to get a lawyer to take on lots of legitimate malpractice cases. The payout is too low to justify the amount of work it takes.

Today, Michael Hiltzik satisfies my curiosity. He talked to former California Assemblyman Barry Keene, who sponsored the bill and now has regrets, and he explained what happened:

Keene, now 74 and long retired from the Legislature, is tormented by the failure to protect the $250,000 cap from inflation.

As he explained to me in an email, he proposed an inflation-indexed cap in an amendment to his original bill, assuming it would pass routinely. Instead the trial lawyers lobby, which adamantly opposed MICRA, came out against the inflation index in order to make the bill as noxious as possible to guarantee its rejection.

They misplayed their hand. To their shock, MICRA passed the Legislature without the inflation provision, got signed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown and then was upheld by the state Supreme Court.

This is your legislative strategy lesson for the day: Don’t get cute. Most of the time, 11-dimensional chess doesn’t work. Just fight your fights.

In any case, Hiltzik has more in his column, including all the reasons that payout caps aren’t really a good idea. The California legislature will take up a proposal to amend MICRA later this year, and if they fail to do anything, a ballot initiative is reportedly on our way in 2014. It should be a doozy.

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate