[Howard Treesong]

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wrt the MSFT anti-trust case like, 8 or 9 years ago? It was about MSFT bundling IE with Windows versus people having to pay for Netscape. I didn't understand why MSFT lawyers never presented the case as a water company offering water freely available to drink as part of your water bill (IE) versus people buying bottled water to drink (Netscape). No one's ever sued the water company for giving away water that people could buy... That analogy seems apt to me and I don't understand why it wouldn't be applicable...?

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Other than the main allegation you articulate above (which is called a "tying" claim because the downstream product is "tied" to a monopoly in the upstream market), I didn't follow much of the Microsoft antitrust litigation. I always thought that tying claims shouldn't create antitrust liability unless it can be shown that consumers are hurt, as Robert Bork explains in his fine book "The Antitrust Paradox." I don't know why Microsoft didn't pitch it the way you say, although to me that's reflective of a much deeper problem than just their approach to it.

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Frivolous lawsuits (& the costs of defending/settling them) are oftentimes identified as a key driver of insurance premiums. I don't expect that you to be subject-matter-expert in this space, but from your view of the elephant, are they? If so, are there any process/procedural "fixes" you could put in place to curtail them? I've always thought that instead of capping the amount you could win in a lawsuit, you should fix the % that a lawyer can earn off medical claims (tho I think you might create a problem where lawyers will only cherrypick the easiest/most profitable cases) Your thoughts?

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I don't do med mal. But my company certainly makes a number of industrial/household products on which we get sued all the time. I can't of course reveal particular numbers, but I can say that the cost of defending frivolous suits is not a big percentage of our actual COGS -- without looking, it's got to be well under 1%. I suspect the lawsuit defense number is going to be higher in the medical service space, just because the causation is messy and the result of service is death much more often.

The British system seems to cut down on the number of frivolous lawsuits. There, the loser must pay the winner's fees -- and post security in order to proceed with a case to ensure that defendants can recover. Empirically, that system will cut the number of bad lawsuits, but it will also cause some number of meritorious suits to never be filed. I don't know that anyone has tried to do a rigorous study of the impact of that system change on either insurance costs or general efficiency. I also suspect that such a study would be well-nigh impossible.

Caps on punitives and non-economic damages (i.e. pain and suffering, as opposed to actual out of pocket medical costs) seem like reasonable answers. I think many states have contingency-fee caps (my recollection is that California's is 40%, though, so it's not much of a cap) already.

Hope this answers at least part of it.