Lawmakers love simplistic buzzwords and catchy slogans that conveniently hide politicians’ — and many citizens’ — aversion to the truth. A good example of that is “tort reform,” the weary bromide that insurance industry apologists breathlessly prescribe for Louisiana’s perennially high auto insurance rates. What is tort reform? It’s a slate of anti-consumer laws that make it significantly more difficult for people injured in auto accidents to sue insurance companies and be made whole.
Thanks to an increasingly anti-consumer Legislature and a powerful business lobby (assisted by at least four dozen lobbyists), Louisiana lawmakers enacted their latest version of tort reform last year.
This comes as no surprise to us. Last year, as lawmakers prepared to debate tort reform legislation amid the COVID-19 pandemic (which effectively prevented the public from attending committee hearings on the subject), we wrote in this space that proponents of tort reform “claim it will save jobs and reduce insurance rates. That is a lie. Such bills will increase profits for insurance companies [and] reduce people’s ability to be made whole after being seriously injured in accidents.” To this day, we’re still waiting for someone to name a single state whose insurance rates actually went down as a result of adopting so-called “tort reform.”
One bill would kill lawsuits already filed against Big Oil by parish governments over the loss of coastal wetlands.
State Insurance Commissioner Jim Donelon, who should be the leading advocate for consumers on such matters, told the biggest whopper of all when he said last year that passing the proposed legislation would reduce insurance rates by up to 25% within a year of the new law taking effect. On Nov. 15, he admitted to the Task Force on Affordable Automobile Insurance that rates have actually gone up 2% this year through October — and that the 25% estimate he gave lawmakers last year was a “pure guess,” not a guarantee. That’s not how it sounded last year.
Advocates of the new law say it needs more time to show its promised benefits. On its face, that excuse makes some sense, considering accident victims have a year to file lawsuits and cases take time to wind their way through the courts. However, in contrast to what he told lawmakers in 2020, Donelon said this week that insurance rates went up because highway fatalities increased this year by 7% across the state. Notably, Donelon also pegged previous rate hikes to highway fatalities — not to the insurance industry’s time-worn bogeyman of “lawsuit abuse” or Louisiana’s alleged status as a “judicial hellhole.”
Eric Holl, executive director of the pro-consumer group Real Reform Louisiana, says tort reform “was never about lowering auto insurance rates ... If we want to lower auto insurance rates in Louisiana, we need real pro-consumer insurance reform.”
“Insurance reform” — now there’s a catchy slogan. But don’t hold your breath waiting for Louisiana lawmakers to rally behind it. There’s too much money and political muscle on the other side.
Veteran cops and politicos share an old saying when they tell stories about the crazy things they’ve seen in the course of their careers: “We …