• 16
  • February
    2012

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum has recently surged in public opinion polls, causing some news organizations to take a closer look at positions he holds today and things he has said and done in the past.

One of his long-held positions is that medical malpractice law needs to be reformed, with a hard cap put in place on awards. However, back in 1999, he was apparently of a different mind when he testified in a chiropractic malpractice lawsuit brought by his wife, Karen, ABC News reports.

She sued her chiropractor for $500,000, stating that he had hurt her back. The injury was so severe that it later required surgery.

Karen Santorum was awarded $175,000 in the case in which her husband testified.

He told the jury that the injury caused his wife pain, hampering her ability to do things around the house and campaign for his re-election to the Senate.

"We have to go out and do a lot of public things," he told a reporter back in 1999. "She wants to look nice, so it's really difficult."

The injury was apparently sustained when she visited her chiropractor for treatment of a sore back. Santorum claimed in her lawsuit that the chiropractor caused a herniated disk.

The jury clearly found her and the evidence credible. This was no "frivolous" lawsuit; the type of thing her husband rails against today when calling for medical malpractice reform.

Though his wife asked for $500,000 in damages in the suit in which he testified, Santorum has long called for a $250,000 cap in medical malpractice cases, ABC reports.

"Of course I'm going to support my wife in her endeavors," he said a few years ago about the lawsuit. "That doesn't necessarily mean that I agree with everything that she does."

He has also said he's flexible about the proposed cap, admitting that it "is somewhat low, and that we need to look at what I think is a cap that is a little bit higher than that."

It's interesting to note how priorities can shift when an issue such as medical malpractice hits home.

Source: ABC News: "Rick Santorum's Medical Malpractice Lawsuit," Jonathan Karl, Feb. 14, 2012