“The Princess Bride” is one of my favorite movies. If you haven’t seen it, you should, but you don’t need to have seen the movie to understand this month’s article. There is a famous line in the movie that succinctly represents my experience during the 2025 Regular Legislative Session.
In the movie, criminal Vizzini, played by Wallace Shawn, has a slight lisp and pronounces the soft “c” sound as “th.” Vizzini keeps using the word “inconceivable” in situations that actually are conceivable. In response, his accomplice Inigo Montoya, played by Mandy Patinkin, tells Vizzini, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
I used to think I knew what certain words and phrases meant, but the last two months in Baton Rouge demonstrated that my prior understanding was inconceivable. I have come to see that these words and phrases have a specific legislative meaning that ignores the usual and customary uses:
- Transparency
- Outlier
- Fairness
- Piece of the puzzle
- Claim reduction
- Cost reduction
- Free market
- Leveling the playing field
- Personal responsibility
I always thought that transparency showed openness, full communication, and accountability. I never imagined that the legislative definition and use of transparency would be different. Many bills this session promoted the necessity for transparency with a jury.
For instance, in the collateral source bills, “transparency” meant notifying the jury what the health insurer, Medicare, and/or Medicaid paid for medical services without disclosing the total amount billed. This health insurance “transparency” is in direct contradiction to the 2024 Direct Action bill, which prevented the jury from knowing about liability insurance.
Within a year, the legislature said juries should never know that automobile insurance exists, and it cannot be mentioned in a trial. Then, these same groups said that a jury should know about health insurance and could even assume that it would exist in the future. Maybe I should have included consistency in the listing.
Maybe the legislative definition of transparency is more selective, or like a one-way mirror. The jury gets to see only what the legislature decides and doesn’t really see all of the information.
The word outlier is defined as a person or thing differing from all other members of a particular group or set. It was very important for folks advocating to limit injured people’s rights to inform the various legislative committees and fellow members of their chambers when we were outliers with our policies and laws as compared with other states.
The new modified comparative fault act is the perfect example. Thirty-five or so other states have some form of modified comparative fault, so proponents in the legislature argued that Louisiana’s comparative fault system is an outlier, and they advocated to change the law to correct this. Just like last year, the sole reason for changing decades of law was that we were an outlier. Without discussing the merits of the proposed law, the argument at least made some logical sense on the surface.
However, when Louisiana laws were in the majority and a change in law would make us an outlier, like the new no-pay-no-play law, we became leaders instead of outliers. When we discuss outliers, we never discuss how we are outliers in the things the insurance companies don’t like, like punitive damages. Forty-one states have punitive damages on general damages. I call this selective outlierism.
Another of my favorites is the free market economic system. It is generally defined as an economic system characterized by minimal government intervention and where the forces of supply and demand determine prices and earnings. It operates on the principle of voluntary exchange, with individuals and businesses making their own decisions about production, consumption, and investment. The legislative definition is not quite the same.
On one hand, we can file a bill seeking to cap damages at $5 million or limit attorney fees on the first $15,000 to 10% (neither passed), but we can’t mandate a 2% insurance premium reduction for each bill passed (no-pay-no-play, illegal aliens, modified comparative fault, and Housely) that limits the rights of injured citizens to recover.
They file bills to regulate the practice of law and other businesses, but have deregulated the insurance industry in the name of the free market.
The new modified comparative fault bill eliminates the long-held requirement of personal responsibility by allowing defendants who are up to 49% at fault to pay nothing for their actions. Personal responsibility means that individuals take accountability for their own actions, decisions, and the consequences that those entail.
It involves recognizing the choices one makes and understanding that those choices have an impact on oneself and others. This also includes accepting responsibility for both successes and failures and not blaming external factors for one’s shortcomings. Attempts to make it apply to the insurance companies and their wrongdoers failed. Why shouldn’t they pay 100% when they are 51% at fault?
Well, there goes that.
I’d be remiss if I excluded some of the other top lines used to support this act, including that this bill is just a “piece of the puzzle” in reducing rates, and it will “level the playing field.”
This didn’t happen in one year, so we won’t get out of it in one year. How about 5 years? If insurance rates go down, it will be because of factors like inflation, costs of repairs, or medicals being reduced. It will not be because of bills that have never reduced rates.
It was very hard to listen to the testimony this session, in which verbal gymnastics were used to support legislation that will punish injured victims beyond the harm that their injuries have already caused. Very often, I wanted to use the immortal words of Inigo Montoya: “I do not think that means what you think it means.”
Article syndicated at Herman, Katz, Gisleson & Cain and New Orleans Legal Examiner.
