Texas Watch—Consumer Protection. Corporate Accountability. Citizen Advocacy.

Even before President Obama took office, the Affordable Care Act’s opponents touted tort reform as a central prong of their health care policy. Texas Gov. Rick Perry even claims that Texas added 23,000 new doctors thanks to a tort reform law he signed in 2003. A new academic study shows that the data simply does not back up this claim, however. According to the study, there is no evidence that tort reform attracted more doctors to Texas:

The bottom line: Our original findings remain correct. There is no evidence that the number of physicians per capita practicing in Texas is larger than it would have been without tort reform. Any effect of tort reform is too small for us to measure, against the background of other, larger forces affecting physician supply, both in Texas and nationally. This ‘non-result’ is broadly consistent with other studies, most of which find that state-level tort reform has a modest impact on physician supply. It also offers a counterpoint to these studies, by demonstrating that the small average effects found in other studies will not reliably appear in any given state, even one which undergoes especially dramatic reform.

Read More: ThinkProgress

Although the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has been in the spotlight in recent weeks for promoting legislation similar to the Florida “Kill at Will” law at issue in the Trayvon Martin case, for decades the organization has been quietly “ghostwriting the law” to the benefit of its big business funders and the detriment of consumers, investors and victims of corporate wrongdoing. Increased attention on the shadowy organization is revealing that ALEC’s now-notorious and since-disbanded foray into gun rights and voter suppression was a tangent from a massive, concerted campaign to set aside laws that hold corporations accountable when they pollute the environment, sell dangerous products or defraud consumers. All the more effective for its stealthy nature, ALEC’s war on corporate accountability has received only a fraction of the scrutiny the media has focused on the Kill at Will controversy.

ALEC’s Civil Justice Task Force drives this agenda under a banner of “tort reform.”  A “tort” is a wrong that gives rise to a legal claim. Tort lawsuits seek to compensate victims for physical, economic and psychological harm and deter future negligence or intentional wrongdoing. Because most tort law is made at the state level and many cases are tried in state courts, ALEC’s state-focused Civil Justice Task Force is a crucial element of a broader corporate-driven “tort reform” effort.

Read More: Media Matters

Top secret meetings, back-door deals and confidential complaints are all a part of the Texas Board of Medical Examiners. The state board is supposed to be policing doctors and protecting the public but some patients complain the system is a prescription for failure.

In 2003 Texas lawmakers put caps on medial malpractice lawsuits but promised to keep a tight rein on doctors by beefing up the Texas board.

Fox 4 has been looking into the board’s practices for some time but late Monday afternoon we found another example of why some patients question who the board really protects.

…

“The job of the medical board is to police the profession, find the worst actors and kick them out,” said Alex Winslow of Texas Watch, a consumer watchdog group. “That’s their job. Slaps on the wrist, administrative penalties, that does not do the job.”

Read More: KDFW Fox 4

With governments everywhere moving much of the people’s business online for easy accessibility, the Texas Insurance Department has taken a big step in the opposite direction.

Until September, the department, which promises to protect insurance customers, publicly released the names of insurance companies and agents who violated state rules. The September announcement, for example, noted that Great American Assurance Co. was fined $195,000 for failure to file policy forms or endorsements containing property and casualty benefits and that the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association failed to process claims in a timely manner or pay claims for storm damage that is a covered loss. Information on violators was also available in the department’s newsletter, TDInSight.

No longer.

Less than two months after Gov. Rick Perry appointed Eleanor Kitzman state insurance commissioner, the department abandoned its longtime practice of naming names. The information is now available, but with some heavy strings attached. You have to write and ask for it.

…

Alex Winslow, whose group Texas Watch monitors the Insurance Department, said Kitzman’s “job is to police the insurance industry and look out for the interests of policyholders. And if she’s sweeping these disciplinary actions under the rug, she’s doing the exact opposite. She’s covering the backsides of unscrupulous agents and insurance companies.”

Why is this information important?

“From a consumer’s point of view,” Winslow said, “that information must be public and must be available so that insurance customers know what they’re dealing with, whether it’s an unscrupulous agent or a company with a pattern of unfair claims practices. This is key information that insurance customers need when they’re making a decision about what agent and what insurance company to use, and how they’re going to spend their hard-earned money.”

Appeals court judges in Texas are increasingly hostile to jury verdicts in civil cases, especially when the jurors rule in favor of plaintiffs, according to a new study.

The report, which examined a full year of decisions in 2010-11 by the state’s 14 courts of appeals, found that the judges reverse more than one-third of all civil jury verdicts and that they are more likely to overturn jury verdicts that favor plaintiffs than verdicts favoring defendants.

Even in nonjury cases, the Texas appellate court reversal rate of lower court judgments favoring plaintiffs was double that of decisions favoring defendants.

The study, conducted by two appellate lawyers at Haynes and Boone, found the Texas appellate judges have an overall reversal rate of 49 percent when they review cases that the plaintiff won in the trial court and the defendant appealed. But those same judges reversed only 25 percent of the cases in which the defendant prevailed at trial and the plaintiff appealed.

Read More: The Dallas Morning News

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott is locked in a fight with the state’s largest insurer over the company’s decision not to renew 11,000 residential and commercial property insurance policies along the Gulf coast.

Abbott’s office requested documents last month from State Farm to make sure the insurer lawfully terminated the contracts, Tom Kelley, a spokesman for Abbott, said in an email.

State Farm responded late last week by filing a lawsuit to prevent the attorney general’s office from getting the information it requested.

…

Alex Winslow, executive director of the advocacy group Texas Watch, said he wants to know more about State Farm’s decision not to renew the coastal policies.

“State Farm should not be allowed to just tuck tail and run without any explanation. So, a full investigation is warranted,” Winslow said in a statement.

“The public deserves to know just what State Farm is up to and what the company’s decisions mean for families and small businesses, including the company’s network of insurance agents.”

Read More: Austin American-Statesman

A 20-year-old Dallas woman whose arms and legs were amputated after a severe bacterial infection has filed a lawsuit accusing doctors at Medical City Dallas Hospital of withholding appropriate antibiotics for 38 hours after she was first seen in the emergency room.

Whitney Mitchell, in an 11-page petition filed this week in 44th Civil District Court, alleges that the delay allowed the infection to progress into a condition called septic shock, which eventually led to the amputation of her limbs.

Read More: The Dallas Morning News (subscription required)

Health care is a major issue in this presidential election. Everyone is trying to figure out how to pay for it without bankrupting our country.

During his run for the White House, Governor Rick Perry pushed states to do as Texas did back in 2003 and cap medical malpractice lawsuits. The idea was, by eliminating frivolous lawsuits and capping the amount a jury can award, those benefits would be passed down to patients in the form of lower healthcare costs and more doctors working in Texas.

But Fox 4 found some families don’t buy it.

Read More: KDFW Fox 4

Texas toddlers being held in restraints as dentists at corporate-run clinics performed unnecessary root canals were among the dental horror stories told Wednesday at a House Public Health Committee hearing at the state Capitol.

The Texas State Board of Dental Examiners, which regulates dental licensing in Texas, was the subject of criticism by members of Texans for Dental Reform and unaffiliated residents, who called for legislative reform while levying accusations of ineptitude, a pattern of withholding or obscuring negative information about dentists, and failure to act against corporate-run dental clinics committing Medicaid fraud and harming patients.

Read More: The Texas Tribune