There is a theme in the Texas Legislature of late: stopping conservative values from entering Texas’ courts, and it’s wrong-headed.
I’ve often agreed with Texans for Lawsuit Reform, a lobbying organization supported in part by insurance companies. This session, however, it’s advocating for two bills that attack our values and liberties.
The most recent examples are the companion bills, Senate Bill 30 and House Bill 4806, both of which include at least part of the following:
[I]t is reversible error for a court to allow an attorney, witness, or other person through argument, the introduction of evidence, or otherwise to … characterize an award of damages for physical pain and suffering or mental or emotional pain or anguish as establishing a valuation of human life.
On Friday, TLR’s bill was revised by substituting “values” for “establishing a valuation of human life.” If the bill passes, using words in court discussing our “values” will be illegal; in fact, any mention of social values will be “reversible error.”
These lines are all we conservatives need to understand that this bill is an attack on our values.
Sadly, there’s more.
TLR’s bill also attacks the sanctity of marriages in Texas. Current law allows married victims to seek “loss of consortium” damages. So, when a drunk semi-truck driver crashes into your wife and she’s forever in a wheelchair, changing the nature of your marriage in every way imaginable—this is loss of consortium.
Currently, Texas recognizes that the value of your life and marriage is more than the dollar amount. SB 30/HB 4806 stops that. SB 30 deletes the loss of consortium jury line and rolls it up in the catch-all “mental or emotional pain or anguish.”
SB 30 also eliminates “disfigurement.” Currently, when that drunk semi-truck driver hits your wife and she gets permanent scars on her face and body, she may seek disfigurement damages as a stand-alone claim for the jury. SB 30/HB 4806 also rolls up damages associated with the scars on your wife’s face and body into the catch-all “mental or emotional pain or anguish.”
Do we even need to ask our wives if scars on their faces from a drunk semi driver are only “mental or emotional pain” to know the bill is wrong-headed?
Shockingly, these bills create a legal environment in which virtually no molested or assaulted child will be able to recover damages once they reach adulthood.
HB 4806’s language limits sexual assault and child molestation victims to recovering damages only IF physical pain and suffering “is corroborated by medical evidence or a prior consistent statement.”
Very few rape victims are treated at a hospital or have other “medical evidence.” Even fewer (virtually none) who are molested have “medical evidence” available to “corroborate” attacks when they reach adulthood and sue the predator(s).
So only “prior consistent statement(s)” will be available to most rape and molestation victims. We all also know most raped and molested victims don’t speak up for years—if ever. So, this required evidence is unlikely to be available.
Even if they did speak up in the past, many of those prior statements won’t be admissible because they were spoken to a priest, minister, attorney, or within another privileged relationship. Many other “prior consistent statements” will also be inadmissible because they were made to a parent or other trusted older adult who is too old to recall the statements soundly or, quite often, has already passed.
We’ve seen widespread scandals in the Boy Scouts, the Church, and elsewhere, when decades later, hundreds of child victims stepped forward as adults, sued, and exposed these crimes, in part to end this cycle of child predators. Yet SB 30, which appears to have been thrust upon us by a group whose members include insurance companies (who actively endorse and lobby for the bills), impairs these future claims.
Last is the continued mean-spirited defense of insurance companies that underpay victims and the hospitals that overcharge us. SB 30/HB 4608 creates a system in which juries are effectively barred from reimbursing victims for the full cost of medical services provided by hospitals and doctors. These bills cap the reimbursement for medical services already provided that a jury may instruct wrongdoers to repay to victims.
Yet the bill empowers hospitals and doctors to continue seeking to collect from victims the full amount of services rendered (even though my colleagues and I personally raised this issue with senators, TLR, and House members). This means that victims of semi-truck crashes will end up as debtors with bill collectors chasing them, too.
We may never know the truth, but it appears that SB 30/HB 4608 is really an insurance front bill, because the insurance companies don’t want to reimburse victims for the full harm caused by their insureds: the drunk semi-truck drivers crashing into us on the roads.
These are not in keeping with our “values” or Texas’ values.
This is a commentary published with the author’s permission. If you wish to submit a commentary to Texas Scorecard, it must be no longer than 800 words. Send to: submission@texasscorecard.com
