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Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee, had asked his staff to compute the long-term costs of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare). After three months of combing through the hundreds of pages of the law and comparing their expected costs to the United States’ fiscal outlook for the next 75 years — just as the government currently does for other programs such as Social Security and Medicare — Sessions’ staff estimated that ObamaCare has created a $17 trillion unfunded liability for the U.S. government.

It has been quiet lately on the tort-reform front. So quiet, in fact, that one could be forgiven for thinking we had this problem licked.  

Suing doctors is getting easier to finance, too. Possibly the most disgraceful and little-noticed development of the last few years is the emergence of hedge funds that actually invest in large malpractice lawsuits, taking a big chunk of any award out of the patient’s pocket. According to Forbes, such investors injected $1 billion into lawsuits, including med-mal suits, in 2010.