Tort Reform Scam?

[Thatcher]

[Medius]

I don't think it is black and white. I already knew the details of the coffee case and still say, don't drink coffee while driving a car. There is a line and it isn't always clear, between people doing reasonable things and getting hurt by a company's negligence and people doing stupid things and facing the normal ensuing consequences and blaming the company for not pro-actively safeguarding against their stupidity. I see a lot of people drinking coffee in the car. It is stupid and you shouldn't do it. I'm not sure how anyone thinks holding a cup of hot liquid above their genitals while operating a half-ton of metal at high speeds is smart.

[Mr.Bill]

Yep, Med nailed it.. It's not black and white.. I'm sure lawsuits are needed to help keep companies from being too negligent..We all knw profits trumps all...

However there are also frivolous lawsuits. People need to be help accountable for their own actions.. I read about the McDonalds case many years ago.. The woman suffered horribly.. BUT SHE ordered the hot coffee... SHE was in a moving car.. It was her decisions, and her responsibility..

[Thatcher]

[Mr.Bill]

I didn't say she was driving.. I know she was the passenger..

Fact still is she ordered the hot coffee, and placed the hot coffee between her knees, in a car(maybe it wasn't moving at that time), but still in a car isn't an ideal place to have a hot cup of coffee..

[The Dharma Bum]

I brought this case up on PCF years ago and was lambasted by those who thought it was indeed a frivolous case.

However the women suffered 3rd degree burns and had to have surgery. Something was clearly amiss with McDs coffee temps.

[The Dharma Bum]

[The Dharma Bum]

[Mr.Bill]

I guess the other side of that coin is:

No one should ever ASK FOR a cup of liquid that can cause 3rd burns if spilled...

[Professor]

Pertaining to this one case, I still don't see it being McDonalds' fault. McDs sells 12 million cups of coffee per year (2009 figure). That's 120,000,000 over the 10 year period from 1982-1992. And they had 700 burns. That amounts to 1 out of 171428.6 people being burned to some degree (not as serious as this one). I drink about 2 cups of coffee per day. For me to hit that number of cups, I'd have to drink coffee almost 470 years! And, I have burned myself twice badly enough to need some medical treatment (1st-degree burns requiring ointment, bandages, etc.). This means that, according to the ruling in that case, I'm at least 8x more negligent than McDonalds! Frankly, if a product is 99.999% safe, then it's a safe product! (1/171428.6=99.999%)

In general, Medius is right. I'm familiar with tort reform as it pertains to medical malpractice. It is NOT true that tort reform leads to lower med mal insurance premiums for doctors. But, it IS true that tort reform leads to better medical care. When a doctor is worried about being sued for every little thing, that doctor will take every precaution against misdiagnosing or mistreating a patient. This seems good, but it can actually be bad (both in outcomes and in price).

For example - People go to the doc for a sinus infection. Typically, a regular round of antibiotics will kill off a sinus infection - nothing extreme needed, just regular, generic, mild antibiotics. But a doctor doesn't want to get sued if/when the first round of antibiotics don't work, so doctors often prescribe the strongest stuff they have. Doctors used to treat staph infections with regular antibiotics. Then, when those didn't work, they could resort to one called methicillin, which was very aggressive and would normally wipe it out. But, because patients would sue when a doctor wouldn't "fix them" the first time, they started prescribing methicillin when a patient presented with staph infections. And now, because the bacteria has evolved, we have methicillin-resistance-stapholococus-aureus (MRSA).