The Insanity of the Law

The current rage is to write a law to clawback bonuses from financial "engineers" at AIC who got paid bonuses at taxpayers expense.

But the law is a very dull tool. Here's an example of the idiocy of the law. Stephen J Dubner writing at the Freakonomics website about unintended consequences of the Americans with Disabilities Act (A.D.A.) points out:

...the story of a Los Angeles orthopedic surgeon named Andrew Brooks. When a deaf patient came to him for a consultation, he realized that the A.D.A. required him to hire a sign-language interpreter for each visit if that’s what the patient wanted. The interpreter would cost $120 an hour, with a two-hour minimum, and Brooks wouldn’t be reimbursed by the insurance company:

That would mean laying out $240 to conduct an exam for which the woman’s insurance company would pay him $58 — a loss of more than $180 even before accounting for taxes and overhead.

Even worse is this example:

...a New Jersey rheumatologist was required to pay a $400,000 settlement, including punitive damages, to a deaf patient. From MedicalJustice.com:

The court concluded Dr. Fogari’s transgression was failure to provide an interpreter for his deaf patient. Such an interpreter apparently costs ~$150 to $200 per visit. And Medicare only reimbursed ~$49 per visit. Apparently, Dr. Fogari communicated by exchanging written notes with the patient assisted by family members.

Dr. Fogari treated the patient for lupus and care mainly involved follow-up visits monitoring her medication. The patient experienced no complications and there were no allegations of negligence. The patient transferred her care to another doctor.

The law is a necessity, a backstop, to deal with horrible situations. But my experience has always been that both the victim and the perpetrator are always worse off after going through the meatgrinder of the legal system. The only winners in the legal system are the lawyers, the prosecutors, and the judges. The other personnel merely make a living at it. But these players, especially the high-priced lawyers, make a killing. The sad fact is that those who are presumably "protected" by the legal system end up feeling like they've been run over by a Mack truck. So you don't want to rely on a legal system to deal with social problems except as a very last, very desperate mechanism. The above examples of the insane treatment of doctors by the A.D.A. law is a perfectly good example.