Three years ago Texas passed some of the most regressive tort reform in the nation. In order to get voters to support the law, proponents promised voters that the benefit would be freeing the state from the crippling burden of defensive medicine that was driving the price of health care through the roof.Texas drastically limited the recovery an injured person can recover in a lawsuit and what did they get in return? Try this on for size:

• Malpractice insurers are making profits (that enriches shareholders)
• Doctors are paying less in premiums (that increases profits for the doctors)
• Doctors aren’t charging less for their services (that keeps the cost high for patients)
• The number of complaints about physicians to the medical board increased significantly

So what really happened? Listen to what the former Texas Insurance Commissioner had to say in the Dallas Morning News:

Bob Hunter, Texas’ insurance commissioner under Gov. Ann Richards, tracked three decades of national malpractice payments. Over the past 22 years, insurers’ payouts to patients have been flat once they’re adjusted for inflation, he said.

Malpractice premiums rose, in part, because insurance companies were trying to make up for shrunken investment income during the queasy stock market after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, said Mr. Hunter, director of insurance issues for the Consumer Federation of America.

“There was no explosion in claims at all,” he said, adding that the premium increases were also part of a normal industry cycle. “They raised premiums because they had been lowering them so much in the previous years that they started losing money.”

Sounds a lot like profits over people all over again. Don’t let this happen in Pennsylvania.