Cheney Says Rivals Too Cozy With Lawyers

Vice President Dick Cheney charged Monday that Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry and John Edwards opposed changes to the medical malpractice insurance system because they were too close to trial lawyers.

During a question-and-answer session with Bush-Cheney supporters, the vice president said the administration was pushing to cap amounts from large court judgments for what he called “noneconomic suffering.”

“Both Sens. Edwards and Kerry have consistently voted against medical liability reform. They don’t want to see reform of that system. I think it’s because, frankly, they are too close to the plaintiffs’ attorneys that benefit from the system and the way it operates today,” Cheney said.

Vice presidential candidate Edwards was a trial lawyer who made millions before his election to the Senate in 1998.

During his bid for the party’s presidential nomination, Edwards raised at least $9 million from lawyers from January 2003 until he withdrew from the race in early March. He took in about $22 million total.

Many of the lawyers who fueled Edwards’ run for the White House gave at least $7 million to Kerry after he secured the Democratic nomination, according to campaign finance reports last month.

Of the $74 million Kerry raised in March and April, about $1 in every $10 came from lawyers.

Campaigning in North Carolina on Monday, Edwards said Cheney was “dead wrong” about the Democratic candidates’ position on how to keep the cost of medical malpractice payments down.

Describing the issue as a “basic values question,” Edwards said, “Sen. Kerry and I are going to stand with families and kids as we always have, as we believe it’s important for the president and the vice president to do, instead of being on the side of insurance companies and big drug companies, which is unfortunately where they are.”

Jennifer Palmieri, a Kerry campaign spokeswoman, disputed Cheney’s claim that Kerry and Edwards had voted against medical liability reform.

“To say they oppose changes to medical malpractice, that’s Cheney’s interpretation, not fact,” Palmieri said.

She noted that during the Democratic primaries Kerry and Edwards proposed putting the burden on lawyers to prove the merit of a case before bringing it to court.

Cheney said the administration wanted to preserve the rights of people with legitimate grievances, but “the way the system works now, we get an awful lot of frivolous lawsuits filed. Lots of times they file simply in the hope that it’ll never go to trial -- that they’ll be able to hoo-rah the insurance company into paying them a substantial chunk of money.”