Today's (Nov 20 '07) Wall Street Journal carried a front page article about a woman & family in the state of Missouri who went through quite a bit of trouble in life when she met with a really bad accident. The article is pretty detailed and describes the situation in all respects. The matter that struck me the most is the absolute apathy of the way the Federal & State law is codified and with what ruthlessness corporate America enforces it. Of course, we are a capitalist economy and businesses should do all that they can to further their economic causes. However, at the same time, how should we treat human life? This is always contentious. Just as in the Iraq war, is human life expendable in return for economic gain? And this particular situation was not even about war. This is just Walmart and its employee.
The gist of the matter was that a car was hit by a semi-trailer on the passenger side with a poor Mrs. Shank being seriously injured. This lady was left in coma at the age of 45 with a family of three sons. The health insurance system was good enough to pay the bills promptly. Eventually, the Shank family sued the trucking company and was awarded a $750,000 benefit by the courts. Justice served ain't it? Of that 3 quarter million dollars, quite a bit went towards bills and medical expenses. About $470,000 was put it into a court-created trust for future maintenance or whatever. Three years passed by with life coming to a routine for the Shank family. Suddenly, Walmart woke up and decided to sue the Shank family for all the money. The logic is a "subrogation" clause that walmart employees sign up to when they sign up for their employment contracts. From the article, it sounds as though subrogation is a common item in employment contracts. The courts favored Walmart in this case and the Shanks had to give up all the money. To add injury to the insult (after the first injury), the middle son of the Shank family was killed in the Iraq war serving the very country where his mother was injured and was not paid benefits. Now, Mrs. Shank is divorced (apparently because she may get more benefits as a single woman as opposed to being a married woman) and lives in memory loss, unable to feed or dress herself with the husband in grief and one son no more. Walmart on the other hand has a market capitalization of close to $185,000,000,000 and has 1,900,000 employees. This company went and sued the poor lady and her family and took away what little they had.
I agree that the law took its course and the situation may be legally fair and binding. I am a complete free market proponent and would not let my emotions come between sane business decisions. However, does this make sense? Heck no! It is obvious that the law needs some looking into and Walmart could surely do with one or two less lawyers with free time on their hands. According to Walmart, they did this because they have the obligation to other employees by recovering costs and in effect contributing to the health planning for all their employees. However, something tells me that those $470,000 are going to find a nice place in the P&L statement and eventually into shareholder pockets. Once again, I agree that shareholder is king. However, in this case, the subjects are clearly at loss.
Hope someone corrects this in the Congress.
