With insurance rates skyrocketing in Texas, members of the state Legislature are debating a potential solution: making it harder for plaintiffs to sue trucking companies.

On Wednesday, the Texas House and Senate held simultaneous hearings on Senate Bill 39, which a broad coalition of trucking and delivery companies argue is essential to stem the rise of insurance rates by stopping what supporters call high-dollar “nuclear verdicts.”

“I learned in law school that the point of the justice system is to make the plaintiff whole, not make them rich,” said Eddie Lucio, a former Democratic representative from South Texas advocating for the bill.

Opposing the legislation were Texas trial lawyers and a long line of Texans who had lost family members or suffered grievous injury in accidents on Texas’s increasingly dangerous roads.

Amy Bolding, an author from Boerne, Texas, related how an 18-wheeler driver on his cellphone swerved into the oncoming lane and hit the car carrying her 5-year-old daughter.

Now, she said, the little girl “has significant scarring all over her body. She has experienced immense amounts of pain. She will likely not graduate from high school or be able to have gainful employment or have a normal life.”

“The conduct of the driver that day was dangerous,” Bolding said. “It was reckless and it was also preventable.” She argued that the new legislation would make it harder for victims like her daughter to get the care they needed.

The debate comes amid two intersecting crises: a 15 percent annual rise in car insurance rates in Texas — among the highest in the nation — and a rising number of fatalities on Texas roads, particularly the violent deaths of about three people per day on the roads of the state's oil-producing regions.

It also comes the week after a deadly accident on Interstate 35, when the driver of an 18-wheeler plowed into a line of cars slowed or stopped in an accident zone. Police observed the driver, a contractor carrying a load for Amazon, “swaying and stumbling” after the crash, but he passed a test for drugs and alcohol.

That was a possible sign of fatigue or distracted driving, some experts told CBS Austin — a problem that truckers told The Hill is endemic across an industry that pushes them to work around the clock.

The main issue discussed in the S.B. 39 hearings was whether plaintiffs like the survivors of those killed in the Interstate 35 accident would be able to tell jurors about a company’s alleged negligent hiring or conduct during the period of a trial when the court would determine whether there has been negligence at all, and who is responsible.

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