By Ezra
Some columns are just too inane too be believed. Take today's dispatch by Sebastian Mallaby. "Team Bush could use some fresh domestic policy." He writes. "Its talk of tax reform has fizzled. Its defeat on Social Security has destroyed its hopes of fixing entitlements. Its feckless energy non-policy has come back to haunt it. Its tax cuts look ever more untenable as Iraq costs escalate. Its proposed expansion of health savings accounts is incompetently muddled." The answer? "Desperate moments call for desperate remedies. President Bush should seize upon the monstrous Vioxx litigation to champion a cause that he believes in: the cause of tort reform."
Really? Tort reform? The way tp revive Bush's fizzled domestic policy is to lighten the lawsuit load of Big Pharma? I just pray a dispirited Karl Rove and Josh Bolten embarked on a hard enough bender last night to listen to this advice.
Worse yet, check how Mallaby sells it: his column is all about the Vioxx lawsuits, a set of deeply flawed claims that will likely be thrown out on appeal. But Bush's plans for tort reform, easily accessible at WhiteHouse.gov in the Medical Liability section, have little to do with the Vioxx case. They're focused on medical malpractice lawsuits, a wholly different, and far less pernicious, beast. What Mallaby wants is the portion of "tort reform" that limits class action suits. And that's what he should call for. Instead, he's using a couple cases against Vioxx to push a policy that's meant to limit lawsuits against negligent doctors, who kill around 100,000 patients yearly, and injure many more.
I find Mallaby, by the way, to be one of the most irksome columnists at the Post. He's a putative expert on domestic policies who appears routinely confounded and uninformed on the subjects he takes on. Tort reform is complicated enough when you've actually drawn a bead on what it attempts to address. But to mix it up the whole with the part, in this case the limitation (usually through removal to the federal court system) of class action lawsuits, is to hopelessly muddle the issue, the last thing that the Washington Post's domestic policy wise man should be doing. As for Merck, it's hard to feel too much pity for them. If the particulars of the cases currently being brought are a bit shady, what they seek to punish, Merck's willful suppression of evidence that Vioxx harms the heart, is exactly the sort of wrongdoing the tort system exists to penalize. Mallaby's sympathies, here, lie decidedly on the wrong side, and that his whole column passes without a single mention of Merck's wrongdoing is rather amazing.
