Largely unnoticed amid the Bush-Quayle campaign’s puerile lawyer-bashing, a few ideas are kicking around that could save billions of dollars in legal waste.

This column is about one such idea, a modest proposal for federal legislation to save up to $30 billion a year in car-insurance premiums. The Bush campaign is said to be flirting with the proposal. It would give conniptions to lawyers who feed at the personal-injury trough; and for that reason, it might be a good test of Bill Clinton’s willingness to embrace sensible tort reforms.

The proposal, conceived by Professor Jeffrey O’Connell of the University of Virginia Law School and Michael Horowitz of the Manhattan Institute, would, in essence, permit individual consumers to choose whether to cut their auto-insurance premiums dramatically by giving up their rights to seek, and their duties to pay, compensation for any negligently caused "pain and suffering." It would also assure people prompt payment for their own economic losses without regard to fault.

Most people (especially poor people) would jump at the chance, especially with premiums exceeding $1,000 a year in many areas. Rational consumers insure against out-of-pocket losses such as medical costs, not against intangible harms like pain, for which dollars are not real compensation.

That’s why you wouldn’t even think about, say, paying a higher health-insurance premium to get compensation for any pain and suffering that you might endure as a result of an accident at home.

If enacted, the O’Connell-Horowitz proposal could lead to cuts of as much as 60 percent in the average car-insurance premium’s personal-injury component, according to a Rand Institute study. That would amount to a 30-percent reduction in the overall premium, since about half of it is for property damage.

The aggregate savings for consumers would far exceed any costs in terms of uncompensated pain and suffering, because much of the savings would come from eliminating wasteful litigation costs.

Under the current tort system, litigation is driven largely by the remote chance of winning big pain-and-suffering awards, which comprise 60 percent of all payments for personal injuries in car crashes. But few crash victims end up pocketing much money after the lawyers have taken out their fees. Many get nothing.

The current system’s adversarial nature also generates, long delays in payments. It is highly regressive: Poor people must pay big premiums for mandatory liability insurance, but if injured they are less likely to get large damage awards than are more affluent victims, since awards (even for pain and suffering) tend to correlate with earning capacity.

It’s a lousy deal for consumers. Under the current system, however, they have no opportunity or incentive to do anything about it. You have to pay to insure against your liability to me, and I have to pay to insure against my liability to you.

The details of the O’Connell-Horowitz proposal are complex, and it’s not without warts. But it is in some ways more attractive, and more politically salable, than the no-fault car-insurance proposals of decades past, which Professor O’Connell helped originate.

The basic insight underlying all such proposals is that lawsuits against drivers over car crashes are the most wasteful imaginable form of litigation.

Of course, personal-injury suits of all kinds are a woefully inefficient way of compensating injured people, because less than half of the money goes for compensation. The rest goes to lawyers, expert witnesses, and other legal and administrative costs.

But the tort system also serves an important regulatory function, in many but not all areas, by penalizing dangerous conduct. This deterrent function is the best justification for allowing recovery of damages for pain and suffering.

Experts argue endlessly about whether at the margins the benefits in terms of increased safety are worth the multibillion-dollar costs imposed by current litigation rules in fields like product liability.

The distinguishing feature of auto-tort suits against drivers-unlike, say, product-liability suits against auto manufacturers-is the absence of such useful deterrence.

Of course, people may be deterred from driving dangerously-by the fear of wrecking their cars hurting themselves, killing a child, getting tickets, being prosecuted.

But few, if any, drive safely because of the risk that their insurers may have to pay damages to someone for pain and suffering (on top of medical costs, lost wages, and car repairs).

A logical conclusion is that fault-based auto-tort suits should be abolished in favor of a no-fault regime. History, however, has shown the power of the trial bar to gut no-fault legislation by persuading voters that it is a ploy by greedy insurance companies to take away consumers’ rights. The logic is bogus-in competitive markets, insurers should make less under a no-fault regime-but the rhetoric has proven effective.

Well, then, why not just abolish pain-and-suffering damages in auto-tort suits? Because such a proposal, however sensible, would run into the same buzz saw of rights rhetoric.

The O’Connell-Horowitz proposal is designed to avoid the misleading appearance of taking away rights by giving consumers a new right-the right to choose lower insurance premiums and to be paid promptly for their own economic damages, in exchange for waiving the (far less valuable) right to sue other drivers for pain and suffering.

Here’s how it would work:

People buying car insurance would be given the choice of opting out of buying coverage for pain and suffering. Those who did opt out would pay lower premiums and could neither sue other drivers nor be sued for pain and suffering. Injured people would be compensated automatically by their own companies for economic damages and could still bring negligence suits against other drivers for any economic damages above the injured person’s own policy limits. They could also recover reasonable attorney fees.

People who chose not to opt out of pain-and-suffering coverage would pay higher premiums than others (though probably lower than they pay now). They would be buying both the right to claim damages for pain and suffering (from their own insurers) if they are injured by a negligent driver who has opted out and liability coverage in case they inflict pain and suffering on another person who has not opted out.

The O’Connell-Horowitz proposal specifies that anyone who drives drunk or on drugs would still be liable to pay damages for pain and suffering. It has special provisions for pedestrians and passengers. And it would cut another source of waste by eliminating in auto-tort suits the so-called collateral-source rule, under which injured people often get duplicative payments from different insurers for the same injuries.

The most conspicuous-though hardly crippling-problem with the proposal is that a few of those (presumably few) people who chose not to opt out of the pain-and-suffering system might nonetheless, in some cases, find themselves effectively deprived of the chance to win awards as large as they might now win. Consider hypothetical:

Driver X wants to keep the rights that he has always had to sue for pain and suffering. So he pays a higher insurance premium to buy liability coverage for pain and suffering as well as economic damages, up to his chosen policy limit of $250,000. While cruising in his 1975 Pinto, X is smashed up by Driver Y, a zillionaire recklessly running a red light in his Mercedes. X suffers terrible injuries and burns. His economic damages total $200,000. He also suffers agonizing pain.

But when X seeks compensation, he finds that he can collect only up to his $250,000 policy limit-the $200,000 in economic damages plus a maximum of $50,000 more for his pain. X cannot get a dime out of Y for his pain and suffering (although X could sue Y for any economic damages above X’s own policy limit). Since Y, like most people, had opted out of the pain-and-suffering system to get a lower premium, the new system bars pain-and-suffering suits against him as well as by him-even suits by people like X, who never chose to waive any rights.

Gotcha! Or so a tassel-loafered trial lawyer might say: This so-called consumer-choice plan is no choice at all, but rather another sly plot to take away consumers’ rights.

To which the response is: Well, sure, in that hypothetical, the proposed system may leave X worse off. But in most cases, X would get more compensation for his pain and suffering than under the current system. That’s because X is statistically less likely to be crashed into by a zillionaire in a Mercedes than by an uninsured or underinsured driver with few assets. And $50,000 for pain and suffering (which X would get under the proposed system) is a lot better than nothing. If X wanted more protection, he could buy more by increasing , his policy limit.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of consumers, those who would sensibly choose not to pay to insure against the risk of pain and suffering, would be a lot better off under the proposed system, because it would cost them less-$20 billion to $30 billion less.