The price of life
: It probably is true that we need to corral jury awards for pain and suffering so we can also corral costs of health insurance and care. But how much is enough? How much is too much? Look at the tragic stupidity of the doctors who gave this girl the wrong transplant — she is now brain dead — and ask whether $250k — the proposed limit — is enough for this family’s pain and suffering. Ask whether it is enough to compensate for killing a girl. Ask whether it is enough for the idiot doctors who did this to pay for their stupid and fatal carelessness. A limit, yes. But just $250k? Ha!
3 responses to “The price of life”
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This brings up a lot of hard questions. Suppose a doctor did a great job in impossible circumstances and someone else becomes brain dead. Is the family less deserving? Who should make them millionaires?
The end result of saying that this doctor’s insurance company should pay the family 10 million dollars is not mainly to harm the doctor. The insurance company will raise their rates for this specialty, perhaps so that some other doctor won’t be able to afford to practice in that state. -
Caps on pain and suffering are necessary exactly because they can’t be assessed in any kind of objective way. Malpractice awards typically award one sum based on economic damages from loss of income and another for pain and suffering, and sometimes a third for loss of companionship.
Fact is, miracle medicine is risky, doctors are no more perfect than the rest of us, and I’d rather have affordable health care and take my chances on pain and suffering than not have it at all. -
Trying to percieve Truth in this issue is like peering through fog – both sides have enough quantities of smoke and confusion to leave us all but blind.
Perhaps what we are actually objecting to is Life itself, messy, unmagical, mistake-prone, disappointing, painful, and ultimately and always lethal. Are we to demand safe passage, and it not that, recompense?
Cold comfort.
