Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I thank Mr. Conyers very much for yielding. The good gentleman from Iowa invites us to believe that the laws of the States are not being overridden because some of these States don't have laws. That's right, because their State supreme courts have said that their constitutions forbid the imposition of a cap on what juries would award people who are injured in medical cases. So, in Arizona, Arkansas, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming, there are State constitutional prohibitions explicitly on damage caps. In New York and Oklahoma, there are explicit caps on damages in wrongful death cases. And in 11 States, State supreme courts have struck down statutorily enacted medical malpractice damage caps: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin. Now, what is interesting in my State, the 15-year-old girl who was raped by her dentist could recover up to $785,000 because we had a whole special session of our general assembly to arrive at that figure. But there are other States where they said you can't have any limits at all, and those are the States that are being attacked by this legislation because now they are reducing them from potentially $20 million or $10 million to $200,000, an outrageous invasion in states' rights and the rights of juries to decide how people need to be compensated.”