Maryland Injury and Disability Law : Washington DC Metro Injury & Disability Lawyer & Attorney : Greenberg & Bederman : Accidents, Falls, Medical Malpractice : Maryland, DC, Virginia

About seven years ago, there was something that various P.R. companies and media outlets referred to as “the Medical Malpractice Crisis.” The premise was this: Due to constant onslaught of costly and pointless medical malpractice cases filed by greedy lawyers on behalf of people who weren’t really injured, medical malpractice insurance companies were all on the brink of insolvency. Going bankrupt. Completely tapped out. Could barely afford to keep the lights on.

The only way that these companies could possibly stay alive as commercial enterprises was to raise their insurance rates dramatically. They didn’t want to do that, of course, but really, what other choice did they have? So they raised their rates, and some doctors found the rates essentially unaffordable, and since they couldn’t practice medicine without medical malpractice insurance, there were some cases of doctors either leaving the states where they set up their practices or leaving medicine altogether.

The outcry was enormous, and legislatures all over the country tried to pass “damage caps,” which are arbitrary limits on the amount of money that a victim of medical malpractice could receive. And in many cases, these caps were successful. In Texas, for example, there is a cap of $250,000 for non-economic damages in lawsuits against doctors. Florida has a $500,000 cap, unless there is a death or permanent vegetative state, in which case the cap is $1,000,000.

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There are two ways to look at Toyota’s latest recall. The first option is to scratch your head and wonder if the people in Tokyo are capable of designing anything correctly, considering the amount of missteps and recalls that took place throughout most of 2010.

The second option is to believe that maybe the higher ups at Toyota have learned their lesson, which is that the correct action in the event of a defect is an immediate recall combined with complete repairs of the problem.

This current recall involves 1.53 million cars, most of which involve problems with the master cylinder, which could leak and cause the brakes to lose power. If you can say anything about Toyota, you can say that their recalls don’t seem to be over minor issues. They always seem to involve the steering, or the accelerator pedal, or the brakes, or anything that seriously puts the lives of drivers, passengers and passersby in danger.

This new immediate action is surprising, mainly because for quite a few years this was not how things were done at Toyota. Nobody there seemed to be interested in really fixing the defects in the cars at all. They danced around the issue, negotiated a lesser recall with the NHTSA that saved them money but didn’t really fix the problem, and hid behind a wall of silence, denials, and claims of trade secrecy privileges even as their cars started to get into accidents and people started to get injured or killed.

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If you have a product that is ultimately dangerous to the people who use it, wouldn’t you want to either fix what makes it dangerous or remove it from the market?

Most manufacturers do exactly that.  If a car is defective, automakers recall it and fix the problem. Or if a baby carriage has a flaw that puts children in danger, the carriages that have been purchased are recalled and those that are still on the shelves are removed.  The repairs and changes have to directly address the problem.

For instance, if I were selling a car which had a tendency to deploy the airbags every time it drove over a speed bump, the correct solution would be to fix the problem.  An incorrect solution would be to change the color, shape or name of the car while leaving the airbag problem in place.

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There was an article in the Washington Post recently which goes into some detail about how “litigious” the culture is in the District of Columbia. The upshot of the article is that from 2007 to 2009, the D.C. government paid out $50 million in legal settlements. There is a quote from D.C’s Attorney General in this piece that misses the mark in spectacular fashion:

"There are more lawyers per capita in this city than any other city in the world…and what do lawyers like to do?"

The premise here is that the reason there are so many lawsuits is because there are so many lawyers. Not because D.C. is a crowded city with a dodgy safety record in terms of transit, pedestrian safety, crumbling infrastructure and a bureaucracy that is slow to respond. Not because people are getting hurt. It’s because the lawyers here in Washington DC have nothing better to do with their time.

The cases mentioned in this story disprove the argument pretty thoroughly. There is the tourist from Arizona who tripped on a poorly maintained sidewalk and had to undergo surgery for his shoulder. There is the mental patient who gouged his own eyes out after being left unsupervised after his doctor specifically warned the staff to have him monitored. There is the family of a prisoner who were not informed that this man had died of lung cancer and had already been cremated until four months after the fact. There is the couple who had two children killed by a DC Police cruiser that was in a pursuit. There was the bicyclist who got hit by a trash can that was haphazardly thrown from a sanitation truck. Not to mention a whole group of World Bank protestors who were detained and hogtied for hours without having access to food, water or the bathroom.

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Children and teenagers all over the country have been back in school for about a month and a half now. It’s been about a month and a half of rising early, doing homework, getting school projects together, and re-connecting with friends and classmates.

It’s also been a month and a half of incidents like this:

CEDAR PARK, Texas (KXAN) - A boy struck early Thursday morning while on his bicycle ride to school is recovering Friday and expected to be released from the hospital.

The 12-year-old was sent to the hospital with serious injuries after a pickup struck him as he rode through the intersection of a crosswalk.

Gaithersburg, MD - A Gaithersburg Police vehicle struck a teenage pedestrian at the intersection of Quince Orchard and Darnestown Roads Monday afternoon.

A press release from the Gaithersburg Police Department reported that a marked police vehicle hit a 14-year-old male as he crossed the street outside of the crosswalk.

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The Washington Post recently published a story on the steady flow of American servicemen who find themselves at Bethesda Naval Hospital upon their return from Iraq or Afghanistan. These veterans are often suffering from the more visible wounds of combat but the focus of the article is on traumatic brain injuries and, as the headline accurately puts it, the “Invisible, Life-Altering Wounds” from which these soldiers are suffering.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States is not fighting a traditional war. It isn’t one mass of troops lining up to fight another. It is instead a war of ambushes and booby traps. It isn’t bullets that our soldiers have to worry about as much as it is mines, tripwires and improvised explosive devices (IED’s.)

The shrapnel from these explosions is dangerous enough, but it should also be remembered that a blast is essentially compressed air that is traveling at 1600 feet per second. If that force can take out walls and humvees, it can certainly do a fair amount of damage to a human being. We see the more obvious casualties of these blasts in the missing limbs, but the Post article is focusing on the damage that is done internally rather than externally.

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