By Rebecca K. Oyler
You don’t need an MBA to understand the cost-of-living squeeze Pennsylvanians have felt over the past few years. Maybe you’ve cut back on groceries, put off a home repair, or stopped your daily coffee run. Even as inflation has slowed, prices don’t seem to be coming back down — and many working families are struggling to keep up.
The reason for stubbornly high prices is a perennial debate on cable news and at dinner tables alike. But there’s a major problem that rarely gets discussed: the rising cost of lawsuits and the soaring insurance premiums that follow.
National research shows the U.S. tort system now costs the average American household more than $4,200 a year – more than $529 billion nationally. Those costs have been growing substantially faster than inflation. And it isn’t a tax anyone voted for. It’s a quiet surcharge built into the cost of food, medicine, fuel, services, insurance, and public projects. With litigation costs rising far faster than inflation, those costs don’t stay in courtrooms: they spill into the broader economy.
In Pennsylvania, few industries feel the impact more directly than trucking.
Nearly 88 percent of communities across the Commonwealth depend exclusively on trucks to move the goods they rely on every day, from groceries and medical supplies to construction materials and home heating fuel. And contrary to popular belief, those trucks are not operated primarily by national corporations. Pennsylvania is home to more than 72,000 trucking companies, most of them small, locally owned businesses employing our neighbors.
When insurance costs spike, small businesses feel it first — and they are hit hardest.
What makes today’s insurance crisis especially troubling is that it’s happening even as trucking has become dramatically safer. Even as freight volumes have increased dramatically over the past several decades, commercial trucking has become significantly safer through investments in driver training, safety technology, and fleet management. Pennsylvania recently recorded one of its lowest highway fatality totals since records began. That progress didn’t happen by accident. The trucking industry invests more than $14 billion every year in safety technologies and training designed to prevent crashes before they happen.
Yet commercial auto insurance premiums continue to soar.
The reason is straightforward: premiums aren’t based only on a company’s safety record. They’re increasingly based on legal exposure—the risk of being pulled into years-long litigation and facing massive, unpredictable verdicts.
Unfortunately, Pennsylvania’s legal climate has a growing national reputation for outsized jury awards and unfairly balanced courts. These exceptionally large verdicts raise costs throughout the insurance market, pushing premiums higher for everyone — from major carriers to single-truck owner-operators. The result is a hidden tax on Pennsylvanians, created not by fuel prices or market forces, but by a legal environment that makes everything more expensive.
Adding to the problem, some lawsuits are increasingly financed by outside investors and venture capitalists with no connection to the dispute, creating a profit incentive for these investors to pursue larger awards and prolong litigation at the expense of plaintiffs.
The consequences are serious. Every day, family-owned trucking companies go out of business because they are dragged into lawsuits they can’t afford to defend, even when fault is disputed or minimal. Many never see a courtroom. Faced with years of litigation expenses and the uncertainty of unpredictable jury awards, some settle claims simply because they cannot afford to keep fighting. Others shut their doors because they simply can’t absorb double-digit insurance increases year after year, despite clean safety records and no major claims.
When small carriers disappear, there are fewer providers and less competition, driving prices even higher. And even when companies remain in business, their increased costs show up in every delivery, construction bid, and product on a shelf.
In a recent survey of Pennsylvania trucking companies, insurance cost and availability ranked as their second-biggest concern, surpassed only by the broader economy. Lawsuit abuse ranked third, ahead of fuel costs, regulations, and workforce shortages.
Yet Pennsylvania’s legal climate continues to move in the wrong direction. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently changed rules to allow cases to be brought in counties with little connection to cases, far from witnesses and the actual location where the claim occurred, in the hopes of convincing juries to grant unrealistic and inflated awards. After this change, filings in Philadelphia increased dramatically, illustrating how quickly litigation patterns can shift when forum-shopping opportunities expand.
The good news is that we don’t have to guess what would happen if Pennsylvania rebalanced its legal system. Other states have already shown the way. Florida enacted major civil justice reforms in 2023 to curb excessive litigation and restore greater predictability to its legal system. An economic analysis by The Perryman Group found that the reforms reduced property and casualty insurance costs by an average of 14.5 percent compared to what they otherwise would have been. Georgia, and more recently, New York, have likewise pursued reforms aimed at improving fairness and lowering costs. Pennsylvania can do better without sacrificing justice.
This is not about denying compensation to people who are legitimately injured. Accountability matters. But a fair civil justice system must balance compensation with proportional responsibility, transparency, and predictability. Right now, that balance is missing.
Lawmakers should pursue commonsense reforms that:
- limit abusive venue shopping,
- strengthen proportional liability,
- increase transparency around third-party litigation financing so outside financial interests are disclosed, and
- ensure juries can consider relevant evidence.
These aren’t radical ideas. They’re practical steps to restore fairness and predictability, while protecting the rights of injured plaintiffs.
At a time when families are already struggling with the cost of living, Pennsylvania shouldn’t make everyday necessities even more expensive through policies that unintentionally drive up litigation costs. A balanced civil justice system won’t solve inflation, but it can remove one of the hidden costs that threaten small businesses, reduce competition, and ultimately drive up prices for every Pennsylvanian.
Rebecca K. Oyler is President & CEO of the Pennsylvania Motor Truck Association, a statewide trade association representing more than 1,100 trucking companies and industry partners across the Commonwealth.
This originally appeared at Broad + Liberty on July 23, 2026.
The views expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Susquehanna Valley Center for Public Policy.
Nothing contained here should be considered as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any legislation.