Virginia Tort Reform Fund Victim of Alleged Fraud

Ben Glass

Attorney
(866) 735-1102 Ext 320

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About 20 years ago Virginia enacted some of the nation's worst tort reform laws for children injured at birth. This law, which protects doctors and hospitals who elect to participate in it, prevents any lawsuit from being filed on behalf of children who have suffered devastating neurological injuries at birth.

The first real horror of the fund is that neither the doctor nor the hospital are required to tell the patient they participate, so a woman's free and rational choice to choose a doctor is impaired because she doesn't have all of the information she would need.

A second horror is that the fund has been chronically underfunded so that families who do apply for benefits from the fund are constantly made to jump through enormous hoops just to get the benefits the state is providing.

Now a federal grand jury had indicted a Richmond woman for allegedly siphoning off $800,000 from the fund

This case will be interesting to watch. How, exactly, does something like this happen. Unfortunately, this is one of the problems of a government run healtcare system. Under a true tort system that allowed injured infants to recover for medical malpractice this never would have happened.