For years, physicians and hospitals had been preaching to deaf ears about the deleterious effects of medical malpractice suits. With so many members of Congress and the executive branch trained as lawyers, our cries brought little sympathy and even less action. Plus, there was also the not-insignificant financial support the trial lawyers guild provided to so many elected officials.
But then the tide changed rapidly. Suddenly, the government seemed sympathetic to our plight. The number of frivolous medical malpractice suits dropped precipitously. I couldn't believe it. It seemed too good to be true. So I went to see my close friend Hale Goodfellow, president of the American Trial Lawyers Guild, for an explanation.
"It's simple," he told me, looking like I didn't have a brain in my head. "If your business is suing for malpractice, the key to achieving a multimillion dollar net worth is finding situations where decision-making is based largely on judgment and intuition, yet the decisions themselves run the risk of producing an undesired outcome. Even though prudent judgment may have been exercised, we believe that in America, the mere fact of an unsuccessful or unwanted outcome is sufficient grounds for a large settlement."
"So are you telling me you found bigger fish to fry?" I asked.
"Exactly!" said Goodfellow with a huge oleaginous grin. "You know, you're not as dumb as you seem." The genesis of their new approach, he told me, was the realization that elected officials in government are forced to make thousands of decisions daily in the face of insufficient information. "It's impossible for them to assure faultless outcomes," he continued gleefully, "so we started suing members of Congress and the executive branch. But rather than middling little million dollar malpractice lawsuits, we determined that nearly every governmental malpractice case is worth a cool billion dollars-or more."
"But don't you need to show they were remiss?" I ventured.
"That's the beauty of it," Goodfellow exclaimed. "Who makes more mistakes than the government? Can't find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Too bad for President Bush. We'll nail him with a multibillion dollar lawsuit alleging lack of informed consent by the American people. Didn't like the way the war in Iraq went? Sue Donald Rumsfeld. At last count we had more than 10,000 lawsuits against the defense secretary in process."
"So if my professor of Near Eastern studies is disgruntled about the looting of antiquities from the Iraqi National Museum, we should file a billion dollar lawsuit alleging malpractice by the defense secretary?"
"Now you're getting it," beamed Goodfellow. "After all, Rumsfeld was no doubt warned by numerous museum leaders about the importance of safeguarding those world treasures, yet evidently he did not take prudent steps to assure adequate protection. You know kid, you have potential."
I left our meeting with a new spring in my step. So what about those pesky new HIPAA regulations? The Secretary of Health and Human Services will be hearing from our lawyers. And as for myself, I am preparing to file a class action suit against the members of Congress who passed the Paperwork Reduction Act. Based on the exponentially increasing size of my federal tax return, I think I have an open-and-shut case. Even if I might not be able to retire after a successful settlement, I am sure my attorney will. 
