Tort Reform

FITS News reported on the issue of the high cost of insurance for alcohol purveyors in South Carolina. The writer complains about the lack of transparency. Lobbyisits seeking to remove South Carolina’s requirement for alcohol purveyors to carry a minimum $1 million insurance policy want to tie the state’s joint and several liability law to high insurance rates. Lawmakers have heard facts, however, revealing there is no correlation between joint and several laws and insurance costs in other states. They want to shift the costs of their illegal conduct back to the very victims they help create.

“We do not have a clue what criteria insurance companies base their rates on… they refuse to give the state that information.”

• The outrageous statistics of automobile fatalities in South Carolina involving alcohol impairment: Second in nation per miles traveled.
•  Impaired driving tragedies continue to cause preventable devastation across the United States with 11,654 drunk driving deaths in 2020, a 14 percent increase over the prior year. South Carolina consistently ranks among the nation’s worst states for impaired driving. South Carolina also had a 14 percent in drunk driving deaths (315) from 2019 to 2020.
• South Carolina’s Constitution (Article VIII, Section1) mandates that all alcohol sellers must be engaged “primarily and substantially in the preparation and serving of meals” – which totally eliminates establishments that serve only alcohol.
• The penalties in the Palmetto State for over-serving an intoxicated person or an underage individual – or serving after hours – have not been raised or adequately enforced by the S.C. Department of Revenue (SCDOR) in the last forty years.
• South Carolina also has no data for the number of lawsuits brought on alcohol establishments, the amount collected or the facts presented.
• There is no mandatory alcohol server training in the Palmetto State (senator Luke Rankin has introduced a bill requiring it for three years in a row, but it has failed to clear the S.C. House).

South Carolina should protect victims by holding those who enable drunk driving fully responsible for harming innocent victims. Why enable these drunk driving accomplices to avoid accountability?