John Joseph Moakley: “Mr. Speaker, when the House version of this bill came to the floor a few weeks ago, it was a massive tort reform package…”

“Mr. Speaker, when the House version of this bill came to the floor a few weeks ago, it was a massive tort reform package masquerading as a way to exterminate the millennium bug. The version of that bill was dangerous and probably would have made matters even worse. Fortunately, this bill has changed significantly from the original version. Although I still have some concerns over the measure, it is still a vast improvement over the last version. Mr. Speaker, in exactly 6 months, all of us will find out whether the predictions of doom and gloom surrounding the event of the year 2000 are all they are cracked up to be. We will see whether or not medical care, food safety, and environmental safety are compromised in any way because, right now, high-tech companies from Boston to Silicon Valley are working very hard to correct their programs in order to ward off potential disasters. I certainly hope that they succeed. But in case they do not, Mr. Speaker, they should be held responsible for problems that might arise within reason because even though we need to weed out frivolous claims and encourage alternatives to lawsuits, we still need to preserve the people's judicial recourse.”