Pharmaceutical Companies Need Broader Protections

I agree with The New York Sun’s editorial that tort reform is needed to protect America’s pharmaceutical companies from the threat of being driven into bankruptcy by excessive lawsuits [“The Wrong Reform,” December 20, 2005]. I want to point out, however, that none of the tort reform proposals presently before Congress will substantially help protect pharmaceutical companies. President Bush’s medical malpractice bill protects doctors and hospitals. The administration-supported class action removal bill, if enacted, will not substantially aid pharmaceutical companies because most law suits brought against them are single-plaintiff cases, not class actions.

The type of tort reform that pharmaceutical companies need is federal legislation providing that approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration of the warnings and design of a drug that will preclude suits against the drug’s manufacturer based on failure to warn or design defect theories. The Bush administration has unsuccessfully raised this type of preemption argument in friend of the court briefs filed in several cases against drug manufacturers. Accordingly, it is clear that a federal tort reform statute is needed to shield drug manufacturers from lawsuits based on drugs that the FDA has approved after a rigorous review process.

DOUGLAS W. DUNHAM
Manhattan

Not All Israelis Kibbutznicks

“Who Pays for Israel’s Orthodox?” [Hillel Halkin, Opinion, December 21, 2004], referring actually to the ultra-Orthodox, is unassailable in its facts. Yes, in Israel, as contrasted with America, the ultra-Orthodox do consider religious study a full-time endeavor to be supported by the rest of the country. But the article is one-sided in citing just them as welfare-oriented. And it would have been fairer to acknowledge a trend among the ultra-Orthodox to work for a living.

Focusing on the ultra-Orthodox is like focusing on one slice of a pie chart. Mr. Halkin directs one’s indignation against that slice, ignoring the rest. Here are examples that lend perspective:

(1) The left-wing kibbutzim mismanaged their resources, the most recent time being a greedy over speculation in a stock market that crashed. They appealed to the government to bail them out. That cost billions of dollars.

(2) The kibbutzniks leased public land to cultivate. Now that such land has appreciated, the kibbutzniks want the privilege of selling it as if they had paid for it. More billions would go from the general taxpayer to that privileged, leftwing sector.

(3) Workers’ insurance funds squandered their assets. They were not held accountable either in a criminal sense or to make up for the losses. The government bailed them out.

(4) Mr. Halkin reported that “large sums are transferred by the government in this community every year, both in the form of child allowances to maintain its high birth rate and of transfer payments to its religious and educational institutions…” The same is true of the Arabs, but Mr. Halkin does not object to that. Why not? Bedouin polygamy is winked at. Arabs enjoy lower tuition rates and admission standards, and are allowed to steal public and private land, build illegally, evade taxes, riot, and directly incite to murder.

To focus on one sector for what all abuse is unfair. Israel’s problem is broader. The government owns and controls too much; people expect it to solve all their problems. The result, conservatives know, is dependency, failed programs, and high taxes.

RICHARD H. SHULMAN
Manhattan

Don’t Secularize Religion

The story “Bush Administration Enters Fray Over Ten Commandments Displays” [Josh Gerstein, Page 1, December 10, 2004] discusses the pros and cons of the gradual secularization of the Ten Commandments in order to mitigate its entry into the public domain. Christmas symbols, too, have become secularized and ubiquitous over the years. Further, God has been redefined as a lay version of the deist concept of the forces of nature; Christ has been reduced to a “great philosopher.”

This is tantamount in absurdity to former president Clinton changing the definition of sex to clear his name. We are a country based on a vast Greco-Roman heritage and the European Enlightenment tradition whose concepts of liberty guided the framers. America is a unique multi-religious, multiracial, multi-ethnic creation, formed to protect the basic liberties of each individual.

Both theist and atheist Americans of must return to our constitutional legacy to protect the fundamental rights of all believers and nonbelievers alike.

PHIL ORENSTEIN
Queens

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