re: I thought Tort Reform was supposed to lower my car insurance rates?

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Quiet. The attorneys are working hard in this thread to convince people there should have been 25% reductions in premiums already and tort reform is bad.

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Please articulate the following in as much detail as you can:

1. What did this flavor of "tort reform" do as far as changes in the law?
2. In your opinion, what types of frivolous lawsuits are the primary driver of high insurance premiums?
3. What is the former purported to do to fix the latter?

Laws wont change anything. I have lived in three states with different insurance markets. Prices are driven by consumer behavior. There is a reason we see nothing but trial attorney commercials during Saints games.

We all pay for those commercials and attorneys. Insurance companies charge what is needed to pay claims and a modest profit they hope to invest. The market is what it is. Progressive, GEICO and others charge what they have to charge to stay solvent and competitive. They don't care about how much you pay.

Tort reforms are a joke. Large settlements are not the problem. 100's of thousands of claims paid 2x's what they should drives up premiums. "One call that's all".

Lowered jury threshold from 50k to 10k. Allows for introduction if evidence that plantiff was not wearing a seat belt. It eliminates awards to plantiffs for dollars paid by health insurance companies by limiting recovery of past medical expenses to the amount actually paid, plus forty percent for the cost of procurement.

Soft tissue injuries.

Lowering the threshold may result in fewer suits that were asking for just under the previous 50k threshold.

There is more to come. Once a trial lawyer is no longer governor, there is a chance for better reform. If attorneys are crying, it suggests we're on the correct track.

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I’ll take your word for this for the sake of this thread, but are juries not smart enough to see through this charade?

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Juries never saw these cases. Judges elected by the plaintiff bar heard cases worth $50k or less. 80+% of policies written in Louisiana are $50k or less. Now, that inflated value of claims is baked in to the expected value of claims.

The tort reform law might get access to juries a little easier, but it still costs the defense $5000 up front at the beginning of a lawsuit for cases that the plaintiff claims are worth $10k to $50k. Until a large amount of these cases actually go to a jury and payouts start to drop, claims continue to cost the same amount and nothing has changed.

To those who say premiums never drop, did we not see a drop during Covid when people stopped driving as much (and less was laid in claims)? Insurance companies compete with each other and will undercut each other if they can afford to. They want nothing more than to accurately predict how much they’ll have to pay and accurately price their premiums accordingly. They are a regulated market. Making an inordinate percentage of profit only draws scrutiny from the regulators.

Signed in summer of 2020. Went into effect January 2021. One year and no massive drops in premiums so attorneys are trying to convince people it was a failure.

shite. The auto insurance companies got their defense lawyers to lobby for and pass tort reform. Then the work dried up for them and they got screwed. Then the rates just went up. Guess where the money went?

There’s a reason every other commercial on tv now is some lame gimmicky auto insurance sales pitch. They make fricking bank.

Tort reform won’t fix the lawsuit problem here. The insurance companies and their stupid arse policies and procedures after accidents result in frivolous suits.

I was involved in an accident once where I was pretty darn sore afterwards. Figured it would go away and the next morning I could barely move in bed without excruciating back pain. I went get checked out to make sure nothing major was going on and turned out to just be muscular. Great, give that time and it’ll get better.

Well the insurance company didn’t want to reimburse me for my gas purchases in the rental car (I had just topped off my car before the wreck). So now I had paid twice for gas within three days, because my rental was damn near empty when I got it). They told me that the cost of gas was just a regular expense I would’ve incurred regardless - it wasn’t. I wouldn’t have needed to buy gas twice in three days normally.

Very minor, of course. What’s $45 in the grand scheme of things, right? Well, then they started claiming that some of the damage to the back bumper (I was rear ended in stopped traffic) was already there before the accident even though it wasn’t.

frick them, I’m pissed at this point, so after that was straightened out I asked for diminished value. They offered me $150 in diminished value. I shite you not. So guess what? At this point I had been back to the doctor for a checkup on my back and had some muscle relaxers prescribed to me by now… frick it, I turned all receipts and bills over to an attorney. They could’ve paid me $45 in gas and $750 in diminished value and I would’ve been happy as a lark. Instead they ended up paying $8,500 in “pain and suffering”.

Dumb fricks do it to themselves. Admittedly I’m ashamed that I did that but I am a petty person and I do not like being walked all over.

You're part of the problem.

Maybe, maybe not. I can guarantee you I wouldn’t have done that if they had treated me fairly from the get go.

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Lowered jury threshold from 50k to 10k. Allows for introduction if evidence that plantiff was not wearing a seat belt. It eliminates awards to plantiffs for dollars paid by health insurance companies by limiting recovery of past medical expenses to the amount actually paid, plus forty percent for the cost of procurement.

Soft tissue injuries.

Lowering the threshold may result in fewer suits that were asking for just under the previous 50k threshold.

There is more to come. Once a trial lawyer is no longer governor, there is a chance for better reform. If attorneys are crying, it suggests we're on the correct track.

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Extending prescription to 2 years, at a minimum, would do more to prevent frivolous lawsuits than any of that.