I’m sad that you would find any comment on your take “flaming”. I think you’ll find almost all my replies are pretty factual in nature, and quite polite. With the exception of my response to Fyr, who insists on making things up to support his beliefs.

However, that being said, there is no way one can just eliminate technical degrees. I don’t know about Illinois specifically, but in most places you only get three strikes for no reason (excluding race, gender). So the rest will have had to have shown a very obvious inability to decide the case on its facts. Most judges that I’ve tried cases in front of will do all they can to rehabilitate a juror even with an opinion on the outcome. So the whole “lawyers kick all the smart people off” is really unrealistic.

As for the “ideal” jury member, there isn’t one across the board. It’s going to depend on the case. And every lawyer has a different theory on who you want. Also, remember the lawyers know a little more than the average observer or even the other jurors because they’ve reviewed everyone’s jury questionnaire. So they know things about the pool you don’t.

“I feel that injured plaintiffs should be awarded medical care for life, but “pain and suffering” should be excluded. At the risk of offending trial/PI lawyers, I believe a ‘health court’ system should be implemented, with safeguards in place to ensure the truly incompetent, negligent, etc. doctors are stripped of their licenses.”

Just a couple questions about your position. Is it your belief that if you are struck by a drunk driver today and rendered quadraplegic, that your lost quality of life has no value? All you should receive is the money to pay for your medical care and of course any lost income? I can respect that position if that’s how you feel across the board.

As to “health courts”, it’s hard to say much without knowing the particulars, but given how few medical malpractice trials there are, is it really necessary to establish a whole new bureaucracy to hear these? When there is no evidence they would get it correct any more often than the jury does? Seems like an awful lot of costs for us taxpayers that the parties involved now bear. And really, why stop at health courts? Why not give every technical question its own separate forum?

The last time I checked was when I first moved down here…

Now who has lost touch with reality? You don’t accept the website of the Illinois Department of Professional Regulation’s website (their state’s version of a medical board) to check who is licensed or not, you post an article supporting the effectiveness of the caps in recruiting neurosurgeons while arguing that can’t/won’t happen, and you still offer no actual explanation of the legal principles involved for those of us who are not in league with Satan, oops, I mean who aren’t lawyers.

You aren’t just drinking the Kool-Aid, you’ve drowned in it.

Good-bye sir. As you once wished me, good luck in your search for sanity.

http://www.madisonrecord.com/arguments/218032-illinois-medical-liability-reform-law-keeps-on-working

I guess they’ve taken you off the mailing list? Is the Internets down at your casa, too?

Admittedly though these guys are in a university town. If you can get caps though I bet lots of neuros are just itching to leave major cities for, say, rural North Dakota where they can work on the res and see lots of Medicaid patients! I know you’d go there if ND just had caps, wouldn’t you? Because money doesn’t matter to neurosurgeons. Only lawyers care about filthy lucre.

Of course if one looks at a population density map of Illinois it’s not terribly surprising why there would be few. You see, those of us who live in rural areas understand the tradeoff. There are fewer of lots of things.

But tell me, are you promising we will have a neuro within two hours if we enact caps? You clearly want caps, where you get a guarantee. So what do you guarantee we get? I eagerly await your response.

And I did mean per usual. In this comment thread alone you’ve already made two pointless lies. All for the sake of an unsupportable proposition that caps affect access. Because the only thing that affects access is money. Which is why New York, without caps, has more physicians per capita than Texas, with caps. That’s a fact little fella. And that fact alone undercuts your whole premise.

But then, yours is a faith based belief anyway isn’t it?

As to your separation of powers question I will see what I can find out for you. I’m no con law expert so I can’t tell you the answer off the top of my head. May have to do with the civil/crim distinction or possibly the common/statutory law distinction. Pure guess is the latter.

Per usual my a$$ – you just can’t take being beaten at debate by a physician so you resort to name calling. I guess I expect no different from a member of the dark minions.

But hey, let’s use the ‘Net appropriately. There is no Dr. Sumeer Lal licensed in the state of Illinois. Check for yourself: https://www.idfpr.com/applications/professionprofile/Default.aspx? Healthgrades is often years behind the times. It seems Sumeer now works in SC. Oops, Matt, wrong again.

Springfield is 2 hours by ground to St. Louis. To anyone but a trial lawyer, that is a long way to go with a head injury (those without brains can’t have brain injuries).

But really Matt, we can argue about the population of Will County, or the current practice locations and call practices of a single neurosurgeon all you would like. But what we are all still awaiting an answer on is how does the “separation of powers” quoted by the Illinois SC apply to tort damages but not to criminal sentences or statutory damages?