Here in Washington state, the advertising war surrounding Referendum 67 is heating up. To hear "Reject R-67" describe it, the referendum is a means for trial lawyers to earn fees for large settlements and judgments at the cost of higher insurance rates. This claim centers around the referendum's threat of (up to) triple damages in judgments rendered by the court.
Those are the two main components to the Reject R-67 ads:
- threats of higher insurance rates to Washington consumers, and
- the invocation of the "greedy trial lawyer" bogeyman.
As it happens, despite the advertisements' claims to be funded by "Consumers Against Higher Insurance Rates", these threats of higher insurance rates are effectively coming from the insurance companies themselves, which are funding most of the rejection effort.
And of course, something doesn't quite add up here. It turns out that these advertisements effectively constitute an admission of wrongdoing by the insurance companies.
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