Posted on 07/29/2007 4:38:08 PM PDT by Sub-Driver
Democratic hopeful John Edwards reported earned income of $1.25 million, the biggest single source of which was a hedge fund that employed him part time. He and his wife, Elizabeth, reported $29.5 million in assets, including millions invested in the hedge fund — the Fortress Investment Group.
Edwards, who has made fighting poverty a signature element of his campaign, said his work for a fund that generally caters to the wealthiest of investors was designed to educate him about the way financial markets operate. Fortress paid Edwards $479,512 for his consulting services.
The candidate and his wife had $1 million to $5 million in the Fortress Investment Fund III, a Fortress subsidiary that invests in businesses in the United States and Western Europe. He had lesser amounts in other investment funds.
Edwards received about $395,000 in paid speeches — most of them at colleges — and was paid $40,000 salary for work at the University of North Carolina Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity.
Edwards’ largest holding was a conservative investment: $5 million to $25 million in a money market fund, Columbia Cash Reserves.
The former North Carolina senator owned several properties in his home state, including buildings in Raleigh worth $500,000 to $1 million each. He also owned land in Raleigh valued at $50,001 to $1 million.
He is right about one thing:
“The time to talk (with your adversary) is after you’ve beaten them.
Seems not enough Republicans are conservative enough to know this. Everybody hugs AFTER they’ve won. The only times Dems compliment a Republican is after they’ve beaten them.
I suppose his wife’s cancer is being treated by a Chinese acupuncturist.
Girls will be girls.
Must be great to be a liberal and not have to worry about the media bringing up the fact that “people who make more than $200,000 a year” include small businesses.Just think what great shape this country would be in if the media was actually objective and just reported both sides of every story, without trying to decide which side is right and which side is wrong. Just think how many liberal ideas would have bit the dust by now, in the free marketplace of ideas. Too bad we don't have that.
He filed at least 20 similar lawsuits in the years following and achieved verdicts and settlements of more than $60 million for his clients. His fee, as is customary in “contingency” cases, was one-third of the settlement plus expenses.
******
Edwards’ first notable case was a 1984 medical malpractice lawsuit.
Edwards won a $3.7 million verdict on behalf of his client, who suffered permanent brain and nerve damage after a doctor prescribed a drug overdose of anti-alcoholism drug Antabuse during alcohol aversion therapy.
Edwards sued the American Red Cross three times, alleging transmission of AIDS through tainted blood products, resulting in a confidential settlement each time, and defended a North Carolina newspaper against a libel charge.
In 1985, Edwards tried a case involving medical malpractice during childbirth, representing a five-year-old child born with cerebral palsy whose doctor did not choose to perform an immediate Caesarian delivery when a fetal monitor showed she was in distress. During the trial, it has been argued that Edwards relied more on his verbal skills as a trial lawyer than on actual science, as questions remain about whether or not it was or could be proven scientifically that there is a direct connection between a delay in delivery and brain damage like cerebral palsy. While delivering his summary to the jury, Edwards said, “I have to tell you right now — I didn’t plan to talk about this — right now I feel her [Jennifer], I feel her presence...[Jennifer’s] inside me and she’s talking to you.”[14] Edwards won a $6.5 million settlement for his client, but five weeks later, the presiding judge sustained the verdict but overturned the award as being “excessive” and that it appeared “to have been given under the influence of passion and prejudice,” adding that in his opinion “the evidence was insufficient to support the verdict.” He offered the plaintiffs half of the jury’s settlement, but the child’s family appealed the case and settled for $4.25 million.[12] Winning this case established the North Carolina precedent of physician and hospital liability for failing to determine if the patient understood risks of a particular procedure.
The biggest case of his legal career was a 1997 product liability lawsuit against Sta-Rite, the manufacturer of a defective pool drain cover. The case involved a three-year-old girl[15] who was disemboweled by the suction power of the pool drain pump when she sat on an open pool drain whose protective cover other children at the pool had removed.
It was an emotional appeal that made reference to his son, Wade, who had been killed shortly before testimony began in the trial.
The jury awarded the family $25 million, the largest personal injury award in North Carolina history. The company settled for the $25 million while the jury was deliberating additional punitive damages, rather than risk losing an appeal.
Edwards received one-third contingency fees plus expenses.
After Edwards won a large verdict against a trucking company whose worker had been involved in a fatal accident, the North Carolina legislature passed a law prohibiting such awards unless the employee’s actions had been specifically sanctioned by the company.
******
John Edwards and His Six Million Dollar Mansion
candidate has built himself a 29,000-square-foot mansion
102-acre estate, heavily wooded site and winding driveway ensure that the home is not visible from the road, trespassing signs discourage passersby from venturing past the gate
He has pledged to alleviate poverty and help the working poor.
This is one businessman that will close down if this happens. Between taxes and workers comp and liability insurance, there is little profit left after payroll for all the bs I have to wade through.
Edwierds has a great economic policy that will tank our economy worse than Carter.
The American Medical Association lists North Carolina’s current health care situation as a “crisis” and blames it on medical-malpractice lawsuits such as the ones that made Democratic vice-presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards a millionaire many times over.
One of the most successful personal-injury lawyers in North Carolina history, Mr. Edwards won dozens of lawsuits against doctors and hospitals across the state that he now represents in the Senate. He won more than 50 cases with verdicts or settlements of $1 million or more, according to North Carolina Lawyers Weekly, and 31 of those were medical-malpractice suits.
During his 20 years of suing doctors and hospitals, he pioneered the art of blaming psychiatrists for patients who commit suicide and blaming doctors for delivering babies with cerebral palsy, according to doctors, fellow lawyers and legal observers who followed Mr. Edwards’ career in North Carolina.
“The John Edwards we know crushed [obstetrics, gynecology] and neurosurgery in North Carolina,” said Dr. Craig VanDerVeer, a Charlotte neurosurgeon. “As a result, thousands of patients lost their health care.”
“And all of this for the little people?” he asked, a reference to Mr. Edwards’ argument that he represented regular people against mighty foes such as prosperous doctors and big insurance companies. “How many little people do you know who will supply you with $60 million in legal fees over a couple of years?”
One of his most noted victories was a $23 million settlement he got from a 1995 case — his last before joining the Senate — in which he sued the doctor, gynecological clinic, anesthesiologist and hospital involved in the birth of Bailey Griffin, who had cerebral palsy and other medical problems.
Linking complications during childbirth to cerebral palsy became a specialty for Mr. Edwards. In the courtroom, he was known to dramatize the events at birth by speaking to jurors as if he were the unborn baby, begging for help, begging to be let out of the womb.
“He was very good at it,” said Dr. John Schmitt, an obstetrician and gynecologist who used to practice in Mr. Edwards’ hometown of Raleigh. “But the science behind a lot of his arguments was flawed.”
Another profitable area of litigation for Mr. Edwards was lawsuits against psychiatrists whose patients committed suicide.
In 1991, he won $2.2 million for the estate of a woman who hanged herself in a hospital after being removed from suicide watch. It was the first successful medical-malpractice case in Mr. Edwards’ home of Wake County.
In the end, Mr. Edwards scored $1.5 million for “wrongful death” and $175,000 in “emotional distress” for the woman’s children.
“Another reason for this year’s [medical malpractice] jump was a strong showing by the Raleigh firm of Edwards & Kirby,” it reported. “Partner John Edwards was lead counsel in eight of the 16 medical malpractice cases in the top 50.”
Oddly enough, his words underscore a major problem with healthcare in the US....Lawyers like him chasing ambulances and suing for anything they can to enrich themselves while at the same time driving up the cost of everything medically related, including insurance that the Dr. must keep.
I've seen several of my wife's OB-GYN Dr's quit due to the cost of insurance.
As a result of these and other cases, insurance rates for doctors have skyrocketed — putting some out of business and driving others away, especially from rural areas. And doctors who have lost cases to Mr. Edwards have been bankrupted.
Patients, meanwhile, are left with rising health care costs and fewer — if any — doctors in their area. It is increasingly a nationwide problem, physicians say.
Dr. VanDerVeer, the Charlotte neurosurgeon, recalled one recent night on duty when two patients arrived in an emergency room in Myrtle Beach, S.C., where the area’s last neurosurgeons quit earlier this year.
“No one in Myrtle Beach would accept responsibility for these patients,” he said. And because it was raining, the helicopters were grounded, so the patients were loaded into ambulances and driven the four hours to Charlotte.
Upon arrival, one patient had died, and the other learned that she merely had a minor concussion — and a $6,000 bill for the ambulance ride.
“That’s just one little slice of life here,” Dr. VanDerVeer said. “It’s a direct result of the medical-malpractice situation that John Edwards fomented.”
“We are currently being sued out of existence,” Dr. VanDerVeer said. “People have to choose whether they want these lawyers to make gazillions of dollars in pain and suffering awards or whether they want health care.”
“Those groups will not give up their power voluntarily”
They won’t give up their “power”? They don’t have any power. Unlike the Federal government, they can’t coerce you into buying their product. Liberals just can’t give up on forcing people to do what they want. I wish the liberals and their ilk would get lost.
What a buffoon!
There isn’t two cents worth of difference between any of the Democratic candidates. They’re in a contest to see who can be the biggest leftist.
“I think the time to talk to them is after you’ve beaten them.”
Apply this strategy to Democrats at all times.
Edwards is arguing this time that a large corporation should be held responsible for a faulty product and pay $42 million for negligence. What they heard was a man tortured by the recent loss of his son plead for justice on behalf of a little girl who nearly died in a freak accident and will suffer for it all of her days.
“This is it. This is her day in court,” Edwards told the Superior Court jury, which begins deliberations Monday. “What you do in this courtroom will last a lifetime.”
Edwards stood to speak. It was his first closing since his son Wade, 16, was killed in a traffic accident April 4. Edwards’ teenage daughter, Kate, sat in the front row.
Periodically, he stopped and asked, “Am I making sense?” or “Y’all understand what I’m saying?”
“There was a wonderful, wonderful thing written this past spring by someone who was writing about a tragedy that occurred,” Edwards said. “It involved the death of a young boy who should not have died. “What he wrote was this: ‘We have to gather around this family not because we understand what they’re going through but because they have to know we share their pain.’ “ Edwards paused, as he struggled for words. “Their loss is our loss,” he said. “Their child is our child. The responsibility we have toward our children. ...”
Edwards looked over his shoulder and spotted his daughter. He opened his mouth and for a moment, no words came out. He turned to the jury again: “That responsibility is a most awesome responsibility.”
When Edwards finished, the people in Courtroom 10A let out a breath. Judge Robert Farmer called for a break. The lawyers filed out with that I-just-saw-Elvis look in their eyes.
Kate Edwards jumped up, ran to her father and hugged him.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
“The primary factor is liability insurance,” said Dr. Stuart Weinstein, an orthopedic surgeon at the University of Iowa. “It’s either too expensive in areas like that or simply not available anymore.” Virginia’s medical-liability insurance rates - driven largely by the very types of lawsuits that made Edwards a multimillionaire many times over - have more than doubled in three years, according to the nonpartisan Medical Liability Monitor. In Edwards’ home state, those premiums quadrupled. As a result, doctors have fled rural areas or quit practicing altogether.
Edwards may have built his fortune in part by relying on the very sort of “junk science” medical-malpractice lawsuits that have created a health-care crisis in no fewer than 19 states. Some of Edwards’s biggest wins — including a jury verdict of $6.5 million (reduced to $2.75 million on appeal) and a settlement of a reported $5 million — came from cases suing doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies over infant cerebral palsy allegedly due to botched deliveries. Yet as my Manhattan Institute colleague Walter Olson has documented in the Wall Street Journal and on his website overlawyered.com, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, in a comprehensive study released last year, determined that delivery problems were not to blame for cerebral palsy in the “vast majority” of cases. Cerebral palsy is instead typically caused by factors beyond the doctor’s control, such as maternal thyroid problems, genetic abnormalities, or prenatal infection.
Then how will he balance the budget? By raising taxes on everyone else? :-)
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