Flying Lawyer
There was a Congressional Tort Reform action in 1994, this from PBS's Frontline:
THE BATTLE OVER TORT REFORM
In the fall of 1994, the so-called "Gingrich Revolution" led to the takeover of the House of Representatives by pro-business Republicans. Tort-reform legislation to curb shareholder lawsuits against companies and accountants was at the top of the agenda. Silicon Valley high-tech firms again aligned with the accounting industry to lobby Congress to pass a tort-reform bill, which it did by large majorities in both houses.
Although President Clinton vetoed the bill, called the Private Securities and Litigation Reform Act of 1995, asserting that it would close the courthouse door on investors with legitimate claims, the Senate -- led by Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the Democratic National Committee -- overturned the president's veto in December 1995. Sen. Dodd received almost a quarter of a million dollars in political donations from the accounting industry in the 1995-96 election cycle, although he was not up for re-election.
"Chris Dodd, here he is chairman of the Democratic Party, but he's also the leading advocate in the U.S. Senate on behalf of the accounting industry," says Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity. "And he helps overturn the veto of his own president, who installed him as Democratic chairman. Dodd might as well have been on the accounting industry's payroll. He couldn't have helped them any more than he did as a U.S. Senator."
But supporters of the legislation maintain that it was a much-needed break on runaway lawsuits, many of them frivolous, which threatened to damage the accounting business. "Tort reform was something that the [accounting] profession had talked about for years," says Joseph Berardino, the CEO of Andersen Worldwide who stepped down in March. "Tort reform was an attempt to at least reign in or limit damages so accounting firms wouldn't go out of business."
While this may have helped eliminate frivolous accounting suits, I don't think it had any relation to medical related tort in the USA. Most medical related tort reform came at the state level. I will show you that in a separate posting.