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

What would you do if you got a check in the mail for $1 million?

We don’t mean one of those Nigerian Prince scams or one of those fake checks that turns out to be nothing more than a solicitation for one charity or another. We mean a real, genuine, and honest to goodness check worth $1 million.

Let us further suppose that there was some fine print with the check, which stated that if you cashed in that $1 million, you would be contractually obligated to seek no other form of income for the rest of your life. All of a sudden, cashing that check doesn’t seem like such a good idea, does it?

$1 million is certainly a lot of money, but if that’s about all the money you are going to get for the rest of your life, it isn’t very much at all. For many people who have been severely injured in states where there are so-called “caps” on non-economic damages, this scenario is not hypothetical at all. If a person is severely injured and needs constant care, a $1 million settlement likely won’t cover the costs for that. This problem is compounded if the injury victim happens to be young.

The Knoxville News-Sentinel recently had an article about just such an injury victim. A woman named Shauna Heath suffered a severe spinal injury when she was only 16 years old, and has since been unable to walk or feed herself. She is now in her mid-thirties. Her injury was caused by a defective seat belt, and she received a multi-million dollar settlement from the company that manufactured the car. But despite that settlement, she still is unable to afford to hire a full time nurse. When you have an injury that requires full time care, even multi-million dollar settlements have a tendency to dwindle fast.

There is the initial treatment, which is certainly expensive enough. Then there is the ongoing care and medication, and there are certainly going to be plenty of things that insurance companies will refuse to pay for. Even people who suffer from minor injuries or illnesses will have to deal with claim denial. And in the case of Ms. Heath, who received the injury in her teens and can still expect to live for quite some time, the constant needs of her condition will completely eclipse the settlement that she received, if they haven’t done so already.

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Every now and then, a product becomes so ubiquitous in our culture that the name of the name of the product becomes the name for any and all variations of that product. For instance, people don’t ask for cola. They ask for Coke. People don’t ask for a tissue. They ask for Kleenex. People don’t use copiers as much as they Xerox something.

As far as we know, there are dozens of brands of acetaminophen analgesics on the market. But when someone has a headache, they don’t ask for acetaminophen analgesics. They ask for Tylenol. This particular over the counter remedy has not only established itself as a pain reliever, but also as part of the American lexicon.

With its place in the American medicine cabinet firmly established, it came as quite a surprise to us when the Food and Drug Administration released a report saying that Tylenol use can cause liver damage. But apparently this is indeed the case. The report claims that acetaminophen use “…was the leading cause of acute liver failure in the United States, with 48% of acetaminophen-related cases (131 of 275) associated with accidental overdose.”

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The House Subcommittee on Health had a hearing on Capitol Hill this morning. The official name of the hearing is “The Cost of the Medical Liability System Proposals for Reform, including H.R. 5, the Help Efficient, Accessible, Low-cost, Timely Healthcare (HEALTH) Act of 2011.” For those of you who don’t know, H.R. 5 is a bill that was placed into consideration early in the legislative term. The bill has quite a few ambitions, but the main thrust of this legislation is to place a cap of $250,000 on non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases.

This is nothing new. Proponents of tort reform have turned caps on damages into the cure all for any and all problems that exist in our health care system. The idea here is that if you put a limit on the amount of damages that a plaintiff can receive in a medical malpractice case, then this would allow medical malpractice insurance companies to lower their rates. Proponents of this theory also state that these caps would allow doctors and surgeons to work without the fear of being sued.

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Have you ever stopped to think about what your life is worth?

We aren’t talking about what your life is worth in a philosophical sense. We certainly agree with the premise that every life is precious. But if you had to put a concrete price tag on your existence, what would the number be?

As far as the United States government is concerned, this very tough question actually has several answers. The financial value of a human life depends on which federal agency you ask. For instance, the Environmental Protection Agency has placed that number at $9.1 million, while the Food and Drug Administration has placed that value at $7.9 million. The Department of Transportation views a human life as being worth around $6 million.

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Since the federal government shutdown was narrowly avoided, thousands of D.C. residents (ourselves included) have been scouring the news to see if any of the budget cuts that were enacted would directly affect them. That might seems self serving, but considering that this whole area very much runs on federal dollars, it’s only natural for the people in this area to take a look at what we will have to do without.

One particular area of the budget that was thankfully left alone was federal funding of our Metro system. If the federal portion of the budget had disappeared, that would have been $150 million that would have been taken away from the annual operations of WMATA. That also would have placed an additional $150 million ($50 million from Virginia, $50 million from Maryland and $50 million from the District) at risk, mainly because Maryland, Virginia and D.C. would only have put that money towards Metro if the $150 million in federal funds was there. So in one fell swoop, Metro would have had to do without $300 million, which we believe is the same thing as saying Metro would have ceased operating.

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