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Group calls for balance in scales of civil justice

Courts tilt too much toward big business, founder says

Karen Abbott, Rocky Mountain News

Published January 17, 2006 at midnight

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A new consumer watchdog group is targeting what it calls an unfair tilt in the scales of civil justice toward the insurance industry and other big-business interests.

"I want it to be balanced," said Patty Skolnik, 57, who founded Colorado Citizens for Accountability after her son, Michael, died in 2004 following brain surgery that his parents think was both unnecessary and botched.

Skolnik said volunteers with Citizens for Accountability - about 125 of them - will monitor the state legislature, civil trials, the insurance industry and news organizations.

"Big business has a lot of money, and a lot of money is power," she said. "We can testify. We can back bills. We can write and call legislators."

She said the group hopes to raise public awareness of wrongs in the health care and court systems that Citizens for Accountability believes unfairly affect people who have been injured in automobile accidents, treated improperly by doctors, hospitals and pharmacies, hurt by pharmaceuticals and mistreated by insurance companies.

Until her son's illness, her own awareness was too low, Skolnik said.

"This couldn't happen to me," she said. "It just wasn't in my life. And I'm an educated woman who should know better."

A former social worker, Skolnik quit her job as operations vice president for a national preschool company to work on the organization, which was formed in July. Its Web site is coloradocitizensforaccountability.org.

Michael Skolnik was 22, an emergency medical technician with hopes of becoming a nurse, when, in September 2001, he unexpectedly passed out.

A neurosurgeon told his parents that Michael had a cyst in his brain and that they were lucky he hadn't died. He recommended surgery. After a few days in the hospital, Patty Skolnik said, she and her husband, David Skolnik, expected that Michael would return to school.

Instead, she said, Michael became mostly paralyzed, partially blind and psychotic. He had the intellectual capability of a third-grader. He had no short-term memory, which meant things had to be explained to him anew every day. He had to be fed through a tube. He had to take up to 35 medications daily. He got severe infections. He had blood clots. He sometimes stopped breathing.

"It was so horrific," his mother said, weeping.

The medical bills came to more than $4 million.

Michael died in the summer of 2004, officially of pneumonia. He was his parents' only child.

No cyst was found in his brain during the surgery, his mother said.

The Skolniks have sued the neurosurgeon and others involved in Michael's medical care. The case, of the type known as torts, the legal name for civil injuries such as automobile accidents and medical mistakes, is set for trial in Arapahoe County District Court in November.

"I'm just trying to take my anger and put it in a positive place," Patty Skolnik said of her decision to form Colorado Citizens for Responsibility. "I don't want this to happen to other people."

She said she believes tort reform, which is intended to discourage costly frivolous lawsuits and includes caps on the damages that injured people can collect, is "big business and the insurance companies saying that my loss of my child, his companionship, his love, his smile, his hugs, everything, is worth $250,000."

That's Colorado's cap on damages for pain and suffering.

"When I hear 'frivolous,' I've got to tell you, I lose it," Skolnik said. "Michael's life was not frivolous."

Jeff Weist, executive director of the Colorado Civil Justice League, an organization of businesses that has supported tort reform, said he believes Skolnik's group is sincere.

From studying the organization's Web site, "it sounds like a lot of their themes echo the same themes that are made by the plaintiffs' bar," Weist said.

"Nobody needs or wants a civil justice system that is out of whack one way or the other," Weist said. "It shouldn't be heavily weighted toward the plaintiffs, and it shouldn't be too heavily weighted toward the defendants."

He said Colorado has that balance now, after tort reforms enacted in the late 1980s.

Besides the $250,000 cap on damages for pain and suffering, the reforms include a law that punitive damages can't be more than the total of economic damages, plus pain and suffering damages. Economic damages are such things as medical bills and lost wages; there is no limit on how much people can collect in court for those.

"Our caps are reasonable, we think," Weist said. "Otherwise you find yourself in the situation that, frankly, Colorado faced in the late 1980s when those caps were created, which is insurance that is unaffordable or even unavailable because of runaway jury awards.

"What we want - the Civil Justice League and the business community generally - is a balance."

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