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

The war in Vietnam seems occurred a long time ago. But for those who actually participated, we are willing to bet that they don’t view it as ancient history. There are still Vietnam veterans in America who have had difficulty coping with their experiences. Exposure to the extreme dangers of combat is not something that can be easily shrugged off. American soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are proving that premise to still be true.

But the Vietnam War was different for a few reasons. Many veterans of that conflict brought back injuries that were neither psychological, nor were they of the sort that are consistent with combat. Many soldiers suffered from a disproportionately high rate of throat cancer, lung cancer, liver cancer, prostate cancer and soft tissue sarcoma. Many of them found that their wives were suffering from miscarriages, or that their children were being born with birth defects.

To be sure, these things can and do happen to many people, regardless of whether they served in Vietnam or not, but it is worth noting that among Vietnam veterans who took part in a military effort named “Operation Ranch Hand,” the numbers of cancer and birth defects is incredibly high.

Operation Ranch Hand was the name given to a military program in which chemical herbicides and defoliants were sprayed over the jungles of Vietnam. The purpose of spraying these chemicals was to remove the habitat, cover and support system of the Viet Cong, and to force them into the cities, where the Vietnamese population was generally less supportive of the guerilla forces or North Vietnam in general. Between 1962 and 1971, over 20 million gallons of herbicides were sprayed over the jungles in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

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One of the crucial elements of proving a negligence case is being able to show that the defendants had prior knowledge of the potential dangers of a product, service or place, but did nothing to warn people or fix the problem.

An example of this can be made with something as simple as a wet floor in a supermarket. If an employee mops the floor in an area and doesn’t put out a sign or markers telling people that the floor is wet, and if a person slips and breaks his leg, that employee could be considered negligent. The employee knows wet floors are dangerous, and he knows there is a spot in the supermarket where the floor is wet. A customer would also know that a wet floor is dangerous and would avoid it if he could, but the problem is that he doesn’t know if the floor is wet or not because the employee didn’t visibly mark the spot. If the customer sees the signs yet trudges on regardless, and then falls and breaks his leg, it could be argued that the employee did everything reasonable to warn the customer of the dangers, so there would not be negligence there.

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Much is made of so-called “defensive medicine” by the politicians and organizations who advocate for tort reform. If you are unfamiliar with the concept, “defensive medicine” is what happens when medical professionals operate more out of a fear of being sued rather than simply doing what is necessary for the patient. In other words, if you come in with a sore ankle, rather than simply asking questions, maybe ordering an x-ray and then diagnosing you with a sprained ankle, the doctor will put you up in a room for the night, order a full MRI of your ankle and call in a specialist in order to give your ankle a thorough examination. They don’t want to take the chance of missing anything so they won’t get sued later.

This would all be fine and dandy except for the fact that health care is incredibly expensive. And since somebody has to pay for all of these extra tests, that burden will fall on the insurance company. So, as the premise goes, health insurance companies end up getting billed for wildly expensive procedures, which forces them to drive up the costs for everybody, which then makes the insurance companies raise their rates, and all of this is based on trial lawyers waiting to sue at the drop of a hat.

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One of the crucial elements of proving a negligence case is being able to show that the defendants had prior knowledge of the potential dangers of a product, service or place, but did nothing to warn people or fix the problem.

An example of this can be made with something as simple as a wet floor in a supermarket. If an employee mops the floor in an area and doesn’t put out a sign or markers telling people that the floor is wet, and if a person slips and breaks his leg, that supermarket could be considered negligent. The employee knows wet floors are dangerous, and he knows there is a spot in the supermarket where the floor is wet, so he has a duty as an employee to the supermarket to keep his job, and to the public for safety, to put up a hazardous sign.  A customer shopping in the supermarket knows that a wet floor is dangerous and would avoid it if he could, but if the customer doesn’t know if the floor is wet because the employee didn’t visibly mark the spot, there could be negligence on behalf of the employee and the supermarket. If the customer sees a warning sign yet trudges on regardless and then falls and breaks his leg, it could be argued that the employee did everything reasonable to warn the customer of the dangers, so there would not be negligence there.

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Tort reform advocates have many bones to pick with our judicial system. By now we have all heard about “lawsuit lotteries,”“judicial hellholes,” and the miracles that non-economic damage caps are supposed to provide.  We have plenty of evidence (both anecdotal and concrete) that lawsuits are not lotteries, most of the “judicial hellholes” are simply places where corporations are not given special treatment, and that non-economic damage caps don’t help doctors or patients as much as they help medical malpractice insurance companies, who actually don’t need much help at all.

Obviously, medical malpractice insurance companies are big fans of these legal protections, and regular insurance companies and huge corporations everywhere are clamoring for protections of their own. These protections would limit the amount of punitive damages that a corporation would be forced to pay in the event that they are found guilty of gross negligence.

For those of you who don’t know, punitive damages are financial penalties assessed by the court that don’t have anything to do with the financial losses that the plaintiff suffered. In civil court cases, these damages are levied by the court when a corporation or commercial enterprise acts when the defendants’ harmful actions were considered either grossly negligent or intentional. Obviously, insurance companies and corporations do not like them, neither does the tort reform organizations. So they are working diligently, both through legislation and litigation, to have the same sort of caps put on punitive damages as there already are on non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases.

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