Who really benefits from caps on medical malpractice lawsuits?

On Feb. 17, 2017, Joe and Sarah Dudley were getting ready for a late Valentine’s Day celebration when Joe started complaining about feeling sick. He had a bad headache. “So I told him to go lay down, and we’d just celebrate another time,” Sarah said. Shortly after, Joe started running a high fever – 103.6 degrees. He could barely walk, so Sarah brought him to an urgent care clinic in Des Moines, Iowa. The physician’s assistant on duty diagnosed Joe with the flu – despite a negative test – and sent him home. He was too weak to walk out of the clinic. “They brought a guy back with a wheelchair, put a gurney bill down and physically put him in the wheelchair – physically sent him home,” Sarah said. Joe got sicker, and two days later, ended up in the emergency room. At the hospital, doctors told Sarah that Joe didn’t have the flu. It was much worse. He had bacterial meningitis, which by then was on track to cause permanent brain damage. Sarah watched it unfold over the next few weeks. Joe had three strokes – two while hospitalized in the intensive care unit. “When he was actually able to come out of it, he had to relearn to walk, relearn to talk. [He had] permanent nerve damage on his right side, lost his hearing,” she said. Sarah said the illness drastically changed Joe. The man she married was calm and avoided conflict. The one who left the hospital became prone to anger and bouts of paranoia. “You never know what mood he's going to be in, or what's going to set him off, and there's no cure for it,” she said. Shortly after, the Dudleys decided to pursue a medical malpractice case against the clinic. The case took up the next six years of the Dudleys’ lives. The case went to trial in late 2022 after the Dudleys could not reach a settlement with the clinic’s insurance company. A jury last November awarded the Dudleys $27 million in non-economic damages for Joe’s initial misdiagnosis and the lifetime of support he will likely need for his brain injury. The clinic has appealed the case, so the Dudl