It’s no secret that the cost of insurance, and particularly car and home insurance, two areas where rates in Louisiana are the worst (or at least among the worst) in America, is the most pressing issue our voters are facing today. This legislative session has not seen a major focus on a huge tort reform push, something most people seem to think is the key to bringing down insurance rates, but that isn’t to say that significant legislation isn’t moving on that issue.

Whether anything gets done to reduce insurance rates is still very much a question, though.

One bill we’re pretty sure will pass and be signed into law is SB 323 by Sen. Kirk Talbot. Among other things, it changes the prescriptive period before a lawsuit has to be filed on a claim from one year to two years. This would do something you’ll see in most of the tort reform bills – namely, bringing Louisiana’s laws into line with other states. The vast majority of the states have a two-year prescription period, and supporters of the bill, which include the trial lawyers but also the business community, say that with that longer deadline there’s a better opportunity to get claims settled without having to go to court on them.

We’re not sure this will bring down the number of insurance claims, which is the ultimate source of why insurance rates are as high as they are here, but it’s like this: if you’re running a wishbone/option offense, and you find that your team struggles to move the ball and score in comparison to all the pass-happy Air Raid offenses your competitors are using, the reasonable expectation is that if you switch to the Air Raid and proceed to get good at it you’ll fix that problem.

So any change that makes our rules more similar to those of our neighbors who have lower insurance rates than we do is a worthwhile endeavor. Most people understand this, and that’s why SB 323, which passed in the Senate and also the House but with some amendments, and will go to Gov. Jeff Landry’s desk if and when the Senate concurs (or after a conference committee report if they don’t), is almost certainly going to become law.

But there are two other bills the trial lawyers don’t like so much that many think would have a real impact on insurance rates, and like SB 323 bring Louisiana into line with other states’ tort laws, which will be heard in the Senate’s Judiciary A Committee today. And it’s up in the air whether those bills will get out.

One of the disappointing things which came out of committee selection at the beginning of the current legislative term was that “Jud A,” as the committee is commonly known, was set up as a 3-3 tie vote with its chairman, a freshman Republican senator named Greg Miller, who’s known as a moderate from his three terms as a House representative and who is a trial lawyer, as the tiebreaking vote.

Miller isn’t a billboard lawyer. He’s not a lost cause when it comes to legal reform. But he’s also not a particular ally where the issue is concerned.

And the House pushed out a bunch of insurance/ legal reform bills in March, only to see things slow down significantly in the Senate. There is a suspicion that the strategy of the plaintiff lawyers, who oppose pretty much all of these bills, is to simply run out the clock and keep Miller’s committee from moving them to the Senate floor.

As an example, HB 336, by Representative Emily Chenevert and HB 423, by Representative Michael Melerine, have been hanging around in the Senate for essentially a month. They’re finally supposed to be heard in Jud A today.

Both bills would, again, bring Louisiana into line with most of the rest of the country – as in, states with lower insurance rates than ours.

HB 336 is the Litigation Financing Disclosure Act. Essentially, it requires the disclosure of basic information in litigation financing agreements to shed light on the shady foreign influences and financial interests that drive up litigation costs. It’s a bill John Bel Edwards, who is the architect of our failing insurance industry after eight years of blocking any real legal reform, vetoed last year, and it passed this time on an 84-17 vote in the House on March 21, more than a month ago.

And HB 423 is a “collateral source” bill which would prevent the awarding of “phantom damages” by limiting the amount of medical expenses that plaintiffs may recover to the amount paid to the provider by the health insurer or Medicare, not the amount billed. It passed the House on an 88-10 vote on March 25, exactly a month ago.

There’s another bill, SB 250 by Sen. Robert Allain, which has a House companion bill (HB 337, by Rep. Jack McFarland), which would get rid of Louisiana’s “direct action” statue. We’re one of only three states in the country where a plaintiff can sue you AND your insurance company, and the effect on trials that statue has is a fairly noticeable one – you get into a jury trial and the plaintiff lawyer spends all his time telling the jury how they can stick it to State Farm who won’t pay Mary Sue or Keneisha’s soft-tissue injury claim from that fender-bender. This works, a lot, because nobody on the jury stops to think that when State Farm pays out on that jackpot verdict they simply spread the cost out among their ratepayers and before you know it our insurance rates are in the stratosphere.

HB 337 has already come out of the House. It passed 86-16 on March 26. It sat for three weeks in the Senate Insurance Committee before finally coming out yesterday. SB 250 came out of Senate Insurance on March 26, and it’s been parked on the Senate floor since, which isn’t particularly suspicious since the House companion bill is the one which has been moving. There’s a decent chance one of the two will pass in the Senate…assuming there’s a floor vote and the clock isn’t run out.

But on Chenevert and Melerine’s bills, we’ll find out just how difficult tort reform is going to be in this legislature, and Greg Miller turns out to be the guy who’s going to deliver that message. If he doesn’t let HB 336 and HB 423 out, then he turns into the face you’ll see when your sky-high insurance bill shows up in the mail.