Wal-Mart ‘moved’ by fierce public backlash

April 2, 2008

The Wall Street Journal ran an item in November that was so stunning, it didn’t even seem possible. The story was about a woman named Deborah Shank.

A collision with a semi-trailer truck seven years ago left 52-year-old Deborah Shank permanently brain-damaged and in a wheelchair. Her husband, Jim, and three sons found a small source of solace: a $700,000 accident settlement from the trucking company involved. After legal fees and other expenses, the remaining $417,000 was put in a special trust. It was to be used for Mrs. Shank’s care.

Instead, all of it is now slated to go to Mrs. Shank’s former employer, Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Two years ago, the retail giant’s health plan sued the Shanks for the $470,000 it had spent on her medical care. A federal judge ruled last year in Wal-Mart’s favor, backed by an appeals-court decision in August. Now, her family has to rely on Medicaid and Mrs. Shank’s social-security payments to keep up her round-the-clock care.

“I don’t understand why they need to do this,” says Mr. Shank on a recent visit to the nursing home.

The company’s motivations notwithstanding, how Wal-Mart went about doing this was just as incredible — Shank was part of the company’s healthcare plan, which included a clause that said Wal-Mart “reserves the right to recoup the medical expenses it paid for someone’s treatment if the person also collects damages in an injury suit.”

As a result, the trust Shank’s family needed for her care belonged to Wal-Mart, which wanted it all. As if the story couldn’t possibly get worse, six days before a court ruled in Wal-Mart’s favor, Shank’s 18-year-old son was killed in Iraq. Adding insult to injury, Shank’s husband felt compelled to divorce his brain-damaged wife because a healthcare administrator told him she might be eligible for some kind of public aid if she were a single woman. (As hilzoy recently noted, we actually live in a country in which someone has to divorce their ailing spouse in order to get them care.)

Fortunately, Wal-Mart, which has been known to have more than a few public-relations problems, is not immune to public outrage.

Yesterday, the commercial behemoth reversed course and announced that Shank can keep the trust to pay for her medical care.

“Occasionally, others help us step back and look at a situation in a different way. This is one of those times,” Wal-Mart Executive Vice President Pat Curran said in a letter. “We have all been moved by Ms. Shank’s extraordinary situation.” […]

Wal-Mart sued the Shanks to recoup $470,000 it paid for her medical care. However, a court ruled that the company could only recoup about $275,000 — the amount that was left in a trust fund for her care.

The Shanks appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the court declined in March to hear the case. CNN told the couple’s story last week, prompting thousands of angry blog responses and at least two online petitions to boycott the company.

On Tuesday, Wal-Mart said in a letter to Jim Shank that it is modifying its health care plan to allow “more discretion” in individual cases.

“We wanted you to know that Wal-Mart will not seek any reimbursement for the money already spent on Ms. Shank’s care, and we will work with you to ensure the remaining amounts in the trust can be used for her ongoing care,” Curran said.

“We are sorry for any additional stress this uncertainty has placed on you and your family.”

Wal-Mart’s “sorry.” Great.

I’d like to think all’s well that ends well, but the fact that Wal-Mart tried to do this in the first place falls comfortably in the “unforgivable” category.

April 2, 2008 at 11:16 am

We not only live in a country where you have to divorce your spouse to get her care, you have to sue all the way to the Supreme Court, lose and then count on the mercy of a giant corporation. The truly sad part is, according to an atty I know who handles these cases, it is not at all unusual for employers to go after settlements. The combo of WalMart and the Supreme Court are what made this newsworthy. The fact the Supremes say it is ok means it will be happening much more frequently with no hope of recourse.

I’m sure Paul Harvey will be able to spin it into a folksy little ad for WalMart

Apparently Keith Olbermann’s outrage and blogosphere pressure caused Wal-Mart to cave. There was a huge outcry from the blogs and many many missives to Wal-Mart.

So, much of the credit goes to those who care about people, those who read blogs, those who protest. America hasn’t lost its heart or outrage at “unforgivable” actions.

I cannot believe Wal-Mart had the audacity to sue this woman after what she has been through. A billion dollar company went after a poor defenseless woman over a few pennies, which by the way is nowhere near enough to pay for her medical expenses. Shame on you Wal-Mart, greed leads to the downfall of every greedy person.

Target move over here I come at least you have enough cashiers in your stores!

“Occasionally, others help us step back and look at a situation in a different way. This is one of those times,” Wal-Mart Executive Vice President Pat Curran said in a letter. “We have all been moved by Ms. Shank’s extraordinary situation.” […]

Translation: We’ll do the right thing because we’re under the spotlight, but don’t get any ideas. Everyone who isn’t able to get national media exposure can just fuck off and die.

We’re a Wal-Mart nation. Cheap goods, low pay, and never enough profits for the top 1%.

Occasionally, others help us step back and look at a situation in a different way.

Not to be crass or profane … but to go ahead and be crass and profane:

How the holy fuck can one look at this situation — or any similar one, for that matter — and decide, “You know, our company makes billions a year, but we really need to aggressively pursue this and take a few hundred thousand bucks from a family who needs it to pay medical expenses due to a tragic accident. It’s company policy, after all.”

How anyone can shop or work there stuns me.

I’m still not shopping there.

Hit their bottom line, it is the only thing they care about. They felt like this would impact sales, so they caved.

Trivia time: Did you know one of the Presidential candidates used to work for the evil empire? Guess who she is and win a prize!

And who sits on the board of directors for Walmart….Mizz Healthcare herself, Hillary.She’s been on their payroll since 1986

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0021,harkavy,15052,5.html
– that was in 2000

and more recently:

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4218509

Is this what they call a “rollback”? Maybe America doesn’t need someone who makes up stories about sniper fire and is a back-stabbing union busting, NAFTA loving two faced corporate shill.

Yes. Walmart patriotic. Going after the brain damaged mother of an Iraq war hero for less money than what they likely paid their idiotic attorneys who prosecuted this abomination…

Wal-Mart’s new slogan: Low prices, always, no matter who we have to throw under the train.

If anything screams out for having universal health care in the U.S., it’s greedy, stupid heartlessness like this. And NO ONE should EVER have to divorce their spouse so they can be provided for.

I’m for seeing legislation that would nullify these contract clauses.

If those fucking bastards really gave a shit, they’d pay the Shanks lawyers fees, too.

Despite the fact that my sisters works for their logistics contractor, I have no urge to “enjoy” their low low prices knowing they pretty much fuck everyone in their supply chain by the Walton family and selected flunkies.

Translation: We’ll do the right thing because we’re under the spotlight, but don’t get any ideas.

Exactly right. Wal-Mart moved to recoup its costs as a matter of course, when they thought no one was watching. They were in full possession of the facts regarding Ms. Shank’s “extraordinary situation.” What was extraordinary was the public outrage when Wal-Mart’s practices received national attention.

Make no mistake about it — Wal-Mart is doing the right thing solely because it calculated that the costs of not doing so in this case exceed what it can recoup from the Shanks’ trust fund. Even the promise of “more discretion” doesn’t imply that the discretion will benefit individuals; it merely allows earlier damage containment in outrageous situations. Which, by preventing cases to achieve national prominence on Olbermann, will allow Wal-mart to continue its odious practices behind the scenes.

Thanks for nothing, Wal-Mart. I’m embarrassed to have bought some DVDs there — a rare occasion, almost unheard-of — just before hearing about this case, but never again will I spend dime one there.

but the Walton Family–not by the Walton family.

This case clearly illustrates, IMO, why we need a single payer (Candian style)medical system. This situation would not happen under that type of system.

I pretty much agree with everyone else here that Walmart acted atrociously and deserves the PR black eye they got. It’s also clear that they only backed down in the face of public outrage, not out of any kind of moral awakening. However, they did ultimately do the right thing, even if it was for the wrong reasons, and that seems to have only stoked the outrage further.

Just as a thought experiment, it makes me wonder what corporate lesson they learned — to do the right thing in the first place, or to stick to their guns when doing the wrong thing because the outrage won’t be mitigated by doing the right thing in the end. It seems possible to me that all of the double-plus outrage at the proper result may have the unintended consequence of making the proper result less likely in the future.

The problem here is a dynamic created between insurance and tort law, compounded by a tort system that does not reflect reality (and needs fixing, but not in a republican/libertarian “tort reform” way). If you start with the premise that tort law exists to make victim “whole” after an accident resulting from negligence, abstractly, you don’t want to give the victim something less than what they had before the negligence (to both punish the negligent actor and out of fairness), nor do you want to give the victim more (so as not to encourage intentional victimhood or unnecessarily risky behavior). In this instance, the victim both won her tort case, and received compensation through insurance. This is essentially doubling her payment: in theory a “windfall” if you like (though I personally wouldn’t count being permanently brain-damaged and bound to a wheelchair as such). Unfortunately, tort law doesn’t generally provide for attorney’s fees and expenses, and we let the insurance take back their contribution to un-double the payment, so really the victim now is in a worse condition. But we still treat it as though the tort settlement is sufficient. And of course the whole point of having/buying insurance is to 1) provide extra protection, 2) allow us to take riskier behavior, and 3) trade unexpected, uncertain costs with regular, predictable costs.

Allowing insurance to reclaim their expenses under our current tort law environment simultaneously defeats practically the whole point of both insurance and tort law. Either the practice needs to be prohibited, or tort law must provide better mechanisms for providing victims compensation after reality is taken into account. Its cases like this that show how idiotic the right-wing tort-reformer mantra is (I’m looking at you Ron Paul & John McCain). Hopefully people will remember that when they vote.

I think it helped that Olbermann named them worst person in the world for several straight days. I’m surprised NBC let him do it. Mr. Shank will be on Countdown tonight. I hope he gets great ratings.

I’m taking our new dog to obedience school, and our teacher insists that people he knows at the local shelter got approached by Walmart to buy the dogs they put down to use in their dog food. So, apparently, Walmart’s brand is the Soylent Green of dog food.

Olbermann did a piece on this a while ago, and what he said pretty much sums it up:

(I’m paraphrasing) “Wal-mart, as a company, doesn’t HAVE to always be thought of as ‘evil’, but it’s stunts like this that undeniably put them in that category!”

All of you read your health insurance coverage carefully. Almost all, mine included, allow the provider to recover moneys where the client has received payment from other sources, e.g. insurance, court order, damages. In other words no double dipping. Is this morally right? I don’t know. But as pointed out by MLE it’s on the law.
Interestingly it was Walmarts insurer, not Walmart that sought the recovery. But there was no outrage about the health care providers actions.

I posted some of the following in another thread but they make sense here so sorry for the repeat.

This from a CNN article:

Wal-Mart earned $100 billion in the final fiscal quarter end of 2007, meaning the company earned the disputed $470,000 in just 38 seconds.

That $470,000 was what Walmart had originally sued Shank for but settled for taking every penny she won in her lawsuit with the trucking firm. Nice of them to back down now. Oh, btw, did they vacate the judgement? Or acknowledge it as being satisfied in the court records? If not, they could go back to the estate and claim any funds which might remain after she dies.

WalmartWatch has setup a fund for the Shanks. You can donate here:

https://secure.walmartwatch.com/page/contribute/helptheshanks

I think, due to the publicity and the generosity of many a good soul in this country, she will be ok. As ok as she possibly could be.

Also from WalmartWatch:

http://walmartwatch.com/pages/learn_more_about_the_shank_family

Let me get this straight, the Walton 5 who make the top ten of the richest people in the country, year after year, offer insurance that is too expensive for most of their employees to obtain, and the ones who do are on the hook for their medical bills if they are fortunate enough to be injured by deep pockets.

If there is any question as to never stepping in that store again, I believe it has been answered. I fricken hate that family worse then Bush, the are the epitome of capitalist pigs. They give nothing meaningful back and treat their employees like commodities to be used until they no longer need them.

They are also the big money backers behind repealing the Estate Tax.

CB there is one more thing you forgot to mention, according to Keith Obermann the accident has left this woman with a condition in which every single day someone has to tell her, her son is dead and every day it’s like the first time she is hearing it.

This insurance clause business has got to go. What is next, they make you pay for your own care until your bank account is dry. I am getting a little sick of companies putting whatever they want in their contracts. You want to sue your employer, can’t, arbitration clause. Their defense every time is they didn’t have to sign. I am no lawyer but company offered insurance hardly seems like something you have a choice about or an employment contract. You have to work and you really do need insurance. WTF ??

I really HOPE Obama can follow through and get American back on track and get these god damn corporation back it their cages and on a fricken tight leash.

Yeah, this is the company that doesn’t wanty it’s “associates” to talk to each other during work hours because that its “stealing” company time for private use.

This is also the company that believes unions are (literally) the work of the devil.

The Walton family was worth $100 million (or is it billion?) collectively 5 years ago. Their annual “contribution” the the Associates’ Annual Appeal for a fund to help Wal-Mart Associates who have trouble was $6,000.

While they followed all their policies of destroying small businesses and turning their employees into slaves, and coming up with plans like this one, it was all approved by a Member of the Board of Directors who voiced no dissent from any of it: one Hillary Clinton.

As I mentioned yesterday, in the end of day thread, while I’m not by any means defending WalMart, this is a fairly common practice. Medicare will do it, if the person for whom they have paid for medical care receives a settlement from a third party.

I am in full agreement with the outrage over this and like others I chose not to do any business with the chain.

The people who really need to be pissed at Wal-Mart and boycott their business are the communities that get suckered into hosting their stores. Wal-Mart doesn’t just abuse their employees they abuse the citizens of this nation. Communities are conned into give Wal-Mart tax incentives to have their stores in their communities and then pull-out when the tax abatements expire. leaving the community without the jobs that were the lure, the loss of sales tax revenue and with a rusting hulk of a big box to deal with.

Wal-Mart also kills communities with how they deal with their suppliers. Tupperware used to be made in the US until Wal-Mart forced them to seek cheaper labor overseas to meet their cost guidelines. Many other communities nationwide have lost jobs to Wally World’s predatory actions as manufacturers need to find workers in other nations that will work for lower wages and no benefits. Wal-Mart is not a beneficial economic force. Look at how Costco operates instead.

Ms. Shank is fortunate in her case that public recognition scared the Wal-Mart predator from her door. But there are many, many other towns, companies and individuals still being chewed-up in Sam Walton’s machine. This nation needs to take action to change the business model of Wal-Mart so it is less destructive to the fabric of this nation.

Cost to Walmart to let Deborah Shank keep her $400,000 and try to live the rest of her life on this small trust- $400,000.

Cost to Walmart in lost sales because of bad publicity for suing Deborah Shank- Tens of millions.

Don’t think for a minute that Walmart suddenly grew a concience.

It’s just business.

I’m just happy for Deborah Shank.

And thanks, Keith Olbermann!

With the exception of Kathy, Irma & MLE, most of the comments on this thread appear to be made by people who take every opportunity to rip into Walmart. As MLE pointed out, this is a problem with tort law and insurance practices. Recovering costs from court awarded damages is not a unique Walmart-branded form of economic pillaging. It has nothing to do with how wealthy the Waltons may be or how many seconds it takes for the corporation to earn a billion dollars. Sorry if they’re so successful but isn’t it just a little junior-high-ish to hate the good-looking, smart or popular kids?

If the Shanks were able to argue that the money awarded from the Trucking company were to cover costs in order to suppliment insufficient medical coverage from insurance company I’d be more sympathetic with their plight. As was pointed out already, the whole point of insurance is to substitute a predictable cost for an unpredictable risk and that recovering those costs by arguing some kind of ‘doubling’ of awards is contrary to our notion of insurance as some kind of bet – which it is. The insurance industry wants to have and to eat its cake. I should be free to buy as much insurance as I want and have it all pay off if I lose/win my bet with the insurance carrier – if I can afford the premiums. And that might be the case in a free-market insurance industry or a well-regulated government-run program as compared to the travesty we have now.

All of you with insurance coverage better check your policies right now and you’ll be so surprised you might even head out to Walmart and buy something nice and cheap with a little less guilt and self-righteousness.

Maybe Wal-Mart was wrong but what about the lawyers that handled her case in the first place there should have been medical coverage for life in any settlement or no settlement period. However her husband probally wanted to money sooner so that was not the case. I think if all the facts are known it falls on the lawyers or the husband not Wal-Mart because they had the clause in their medical contract.

I can’t help but believe that if Sam Walton was still alive he would be outraged that the company he founded has done something so outrages to a helpless family. I agree with everyone, they have gone to far this time. I will never shop at Wal-Mart again. Shame on you Wally World!!

Insurance lobbies have it all locked up. You got tort reform so you can’t sue for more than your costs, basically, then when the insurance company you sue pays out, the one that already paid out gets to take it. Why not cut out the middle man and just let one insurance company sue the other insurance company? Let’s face facts, if you get permanently disabled like Mrs. Shank, you’re on your own. Period. It’s capitalistic social darwinism at its best. And if you have the misfortune to be married, your spouse is doomed to poverty too. That’s the only evidence of shared risk in this scenario…

Wal-Mart is just a symptom of the disease. The problem is, the right has poisoned the well and made ‘liberal’ a dirty word (not to mention tolerant, compassionate, intellectual…ad infinitum). Consequently the same people who are getting hosed by the likes of Wal-Mart (not to mention big oil, pharma, agra-business…ad nauseum) are instinctively voting for the candidate who will appoint ‘activist’ right-wing judges who will keep rendering appealate abominations such as this.

I get my hackles up when I hear people bashing lawyers who they see as charging exhorbitant fees. I certainly don’t know anything about the Shank family’s representation but I doubt seriously they’d have gotten penny-one without it. The right has successfully sold the meme that lawyers are the problem. They aren’t. John Edwards made a fortune as a trial lawyer suing corporations. Does anyone know the number of pro-bono cases this allowed him to take? Lawyers are evil; until you need one!

it makes me wonder what corporate lesson they learned — to do the right thing in the first place, or to stick to their guns when doing the wrong thing because the outrage won’t be mitigated by doing the right thing in the end.

But they didn’t do the right thing in the end — they did only what they had to do to make the current PR nightmare go away, while explicitly reserving the right to hose their current “associates” in exactly the same way, unless more bad publicity forces their hand a second time.

To reinforce what Irma (@20) and Kathy (@24) have said, here’s an article form the front page of yesterday’s NYT:
http://tinyurl.com/356b7v

It’s not quite the same thing as Walmart has done (ie try and re-coup the money already spent) but it’s another aspect of the same issue, ie double dipping, with the insurers refusing to pay out until people jump through a gadzillion of hoops (often frivolously so), clogging up Social Security in the process.

If all of us had *one and the same* insurer (like Medicare for all), there’d be no issue of double dipping. Just sayin’…

“Double-dipping” makes it sound like the person who was injured is being opportunistic when all they want is the ability to take care of themselves in the future, since they are now virtually uninsurable. But then, awards for “pain and suffering” had to be eliminated because the poor insurance companies were going broke…well, unless you have a social safetly net that is government sponsored, egalitarian, and just, you get this problem. You can’t just dump diseased people on a mountaintop to die. Care takes money. Someone has to pay. I’m sorry but rich people (and all of us) just need to accept the fact that taxes are necesary sometimes and that it is patriotic to pay them. I personally don’t know how people in the Club for Growth sleep at night.

Why does it take a story like this for Americans to finally be pissed enough at Wal-Mart and to consider not shopping there? If you have paid attention to Wal-Mart’s scary PR history, you will find they have been f***ing the US for years. Have you walked through a Wal-Mart recently to look at the clientele that shops there? They are the very people that Wal-Mart f**ks everyday! Every “low price” these unfortunate shoppers discover puts another hard working person out of a job in this country. Shame on anyone that even considers shopping there!

Oh, and all of you who are attributing WalMart’s change of heart to Olberman, bloggers, etc ? How wrong you are! When Mr Shanks heard about WalMart’s new decision, he gave thanks squarely where they belonged: to Jesus (it was on Think Progress, last night, if you don’t believe me). I’m sure he’ll be voting — once for himself and once for his disabled wife — for McSame…

As much as this story is heartbreaking, this is not the reason I stopped shopping at Walmart. They don’t pay their fair share of taxes. WI and NC are suing them because Walmart came up with a tax shelter scheme to rent their facilities – a deduction from their taxes – from a Walmart owned company. It (albeit legally) screwed state and local governments out of tens of millions of dollars which could have been used for local services.

I have to pay my taxes and so should they. ESPECIALLY at a time when state and local governments are struggling with funding as it is due to the economic mess the goopers have created for all of us.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/al-norman/walmart-americas-tax-d_b_68334.html

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2008/01/wal-mart-loses.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/al-norman/walmart-pays-208678-fo_b_84601.html

http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=652167

(Google Walmart Taxes NC, MA, WI and others and you will see too many links to just how much of a deadbeat organization this is.)

Oh, and I neglected to mention that while the states are suing Walmart for their taxes, THAT costs the taxpayers money, too. Again, money which could go to state services.

In line with MuthaZ and CharlieT…it is not Walmart, lawyers, or insurance companies fault. It is ours. They are the natural and desired result of the system we have created. Feel free to try to knock Walmart down — a lot of good that attempt has done so far. And even if you succeed, someone will fill a similar niche and take advantage of those loopholes. Fix the system first, don’t even make it possible. Don’t like this case, or walmart shipping slave labor jobs & environmentally ruinous manufacturing overseas? Fight for fair trade. Fight for unions. Fight for environmental standards. Fight against “tort-reform”. (hint: start by not voting republicans!)

Libra, I saw that yesterday on TP and never quite thought of it as you said. You’re probably right. And if that is the case, it is indeed very, very sad.

MuthaZ.

What you are failing to realize is the Shanks had no way of winning against Walmart’s dream legal team. It was done before it started. She could have spent the entire $400k and still lost. This wasn’t decided in court, this was decided years ago when the dream legal team decided to put that clause in it’s insurance policies. You think they are playing fair ? Please, they come in and run over tiny town’s legal departments, build wherever they want, including wetlands, which are cheap, and when anyone fights back, they bring in the Walmart dream team.

I hope you never find yourself up against these guys. I have and even though it was work related I can tell you they don’t care what you have to say unless it is yes. They tell you what time of day it is, they don’t care what your watch says and this was for a couple hundred bucks in tax. It’s the thug mentality and after speaking with several people I realized this is how they do business.

I am so tired of people acting like Walmart is some great business model, they are the mafia of business models. Dopes with lots of muscle and even more intimidation. That is how they operate and just because their dream legal team finds a crack and exploits it does not make it right. No one else has the heart to do what they do and that is why they excel.

It’s not just here, they built a fricken Walmart in Mexico that you can see from a one of the southern ancient temples. One of the major tourist attraction neat Playa de Carmen. All over the world, they are bullying small communites. The best part is when they close, they refuse to sell the land, or removed the structure. So an eye sore remains. They have been sued and won so the American landscape is flowered with square run down dumps.

Tom, the Walton are tied for 4,5,6,7, and 8th richest peopel in the US with a net worth of $90B or $18B each.

And yet they can not find in in their ice cold hearts to offer a decent wage or even affordable insurance w/o stings. Some days I wish we were China and we could seize all that wealth and use if for something beside destroying communities. Then they might understand how it feels to have someone pull the rug out from underneath of them. Not really, China sucks, but I do like how they handle corrupt rich pigs.

4 Walton, Alice L 18.0
5 Walton, Helen R 18.0
6 Walton, Jim C 18.0
7 Walton, John T 18.0
8 Walton, S Robson 18.0

Sam is dead and I think one of the boys died last year in a plane wreck, either way, all that is inherited money and the Walton’s spend more on repealing the Estate tax then all their right winger charities combined.

But please tell me how you are fine with all that MuthaZ.

MuthaZ @#27, your case falls flat on a number of premises. Wal-Mart’s absconding with Ms. Shanks settlement is egregious because the settlement is not for the immediate costs that the health insurance plan would cover, but for the long term costs and damages that it does not. Ms. Shanks brain damage is permanent and therefore will not be fixed by a penny from Wal-Mart’s insurance payments. Ms. Shanks lost her ability to provide income for herself due to the accident and will need long-term care for the rest of her life related to the unfixable damage to her brain. Wal-Mart’s insurance plan has a cap and conditions that will not cover these effects of the accident. The settlement is an entirely different pool of money dispensed for an entirely different purpose than paying for immediate healthcare costs.

Wal-Mart saw cash and leapt for it, whether they deserved it or not. The excuse about Ms. Shanks “double dipping” the system and cashing in of her misery is pretty damn bogus.

The excuse about Ms. Shanks “double dipping” the system and cashing in of her misery is pretty damn bogus.
—-

No, it is exactly on point. EVERY insurance policy contains the language in WALMART’s policy. Whenever you sue a tortfeasor, the insurance company is entitled to recoup their losses (insurance payouts) which were caused by the tortfeasor.

Here in PA, its actually included in the jury instructions (and I drafted them, with the intent of informing the jury that the plaintiff would be responsible for paying to the insurance company part of the verdict).

Normally you don’t settle a case until you clear the settlement with the insurance company who is going to come looking for their cut, so as to avoid this very situation.

This is what happens when the government becomes an arm of big business. Place those from within the various industries in a position to write the legislation and this is what results.

As Rev. Wright, who I have been quoting a lot lately, said – the chickens have come home to roost.

It’s not just the Republicans, the Democrats” record on this form of facism or corporatism (business and government in cahoots) isn’t any better.

Also, just because this is common practice doesn’t in any way excuse WalMart, or any company, corporation, or individual, from doing the right thing.

Great points all, but for the record I wasn’t making a case against “double-dipping”. In fact I was pointing out that I should be able to place any kind of bet I want as long as I can afford the premiums based on the odds. I believe in double-, triple-, even quadruple dipping.

The problem with many of the comments is that they vilify Wal-Mart for a problem that is not Wal-Mart’s – it’s the insurance industry’s. It really doesn’t matter if the Waltons are the richest people in the universe. This is America, and nobody has an obligation to share their wealth unless it’s required by law. It just ends up sounding like sour grapes: “oh gosh, my job sucks, my insurance sucks and I should be entitle to some of the Walton’s wealth because they can’t spend it all.” Great idea, if you live in a socialist country. But you don’t, do you? And who cares if you don’t like their business model. Don’t do business with them. Free-market capitalism isn’t for people with weak-stomachs. Even worse is hybrid socialsm like in the US where we control sugar, oil, corn and poor people rather than letting markets take their victims freely, right?

MuthaZ – that’s not the whole picture!

When the deck is stacked so the wealthy and powerful keep getting more so and often on the backs and at the expense of others – than something is morally rotten.

Yes, WalMart has a right to pursue business and we have a right to either support them or not. But when entities, because of their power take unfair advantage and sometimes even undermine either the will of the people or the spirit of the law (in this case fair and equal justice) because of their power and all that that entails, then we are talking about much bigger issues than just business practices or capitalism.

The powerful often proceed with a sense of entitlement. Many, who are intimidated by that power, never question this sense of entitlement. When the “little folk” fight back with their own sense of entitlement – well that’s when we start hearing the cries of it’s a free country and our system is free market capitalism. There is very little about our economic system that is “free market.” Just a quick glance at NAFTA or the big box stores and what they do with their sales tax collected or the advantages pharmaceutical and oil companies have will tell us that.

It used to be that in this country a workingman could work for four or five years live raise a family, buy a house and save enough money to start a business. It used to be that a workingman with a union job could work, live comfortably, send his kids to college, and retire comfortably. Those days are gone – and not because it’s a free market.

Government keeps handing big business blank checks, and big business keeps using them to bleed us dry.

I think the outrage by the people stems from the notion that everyone has a right to “live” and the feeling that slowly we are being squeezed so hard by the powers that be so that eventually most of us will just not be able to live anymore. When you have healthy working people contemplating suicide as a viable economic choice for their family and married partners having to divorce to just scrap by then something is rotten to the core.

We are much closer to fascism than we are to socialism unless of course we look at corporate socialism, which is just running rampant at the expense of all our pocketbooks.

We agree. I called it “hybrid socialism” in my comment which speaks more to the corruption of free-market principles than “fascism” which reeks of resentment.

You bet I’m resentful.

I resent the feelings of entitlement from the powerful to more wealth at others’ expense and certainly at the expense of the common good.

A prime example, and only one of many examples, is people writing legislation in the EPA that would benefit financially from lax laws concerning the environment. The common good be dammed, what is paramount is their sense of entitlement for more wealth and power – at least in their feeble little warped minds.

The whole fiasco of our involvement in Iraq is ripe with this obscene sense of entitlement.

Yeah, I resent the hell out of those who feel they can profit at the expense of others in a morally corrupt manner and because they have the power they feel it is justified.

WalMart, in this latest episode, again displays this exact mentality.

When I use the term “fascism” I don’t use it with something like Nazi Germany in mind, but rather in the manner that Robert Kennedy Jr. uses it – when government and business are in control and in concert. Mussolini called this “corporatism.”

The fact is that the average citizen only has government to protect them from the excesses of business. When they are in bed together (and that dynamic is where entities like WalMart gets much of its power and in turn their sense of entitlement) the people have no recourse, no representation, and no hope.

That, in essence, is the appeal of Obama for many. I’m not entirely convinced that Obama will ultimately turn out to be that person many hope he is, but he is the only one on the scene that even offers anything other than the same old thing – so we’ll see how this all turns out.

What is insurance?

Oh, it’s just someone who’ll agree to pay your bills when you’re not able to, and make sure that they get every penny they paid for you back from you.

Yeah, wonderful system, guys.

I am so glad Wal-Mart stopped hounding the Shanks. It just goes to show that sometimes the cheapest is the easier route to being an asshole. The Waltons are filthy rich, Wal-Mart grossed billions last year. I mean they farted and made a half million.

I have always hated Wal-Mart. I never shop there for personal reasons. They treat their employees like dirt. They purposely will hire part time folk so they don’t have to offer them health care coverage. They build in areas that usually are depressed, so at first, people are thrilled to get jobs, but then it still bites them in the ass.

$275,000 isn’t going to cover Mrs. Shank’s health care for long, though.

This is insane. The law is the law. What if it were a much smaller company that faced this dilemma? I am sympathetic to the plight here, but are Walmart and its’ shareholders (which include pension funds, grandmothers retirement earnings, etc.) truly obligated to be benevolent regardless of law and contractual ageements? Get a life here people.

The only insanity in this thing is the continued justification and/or rationalization of an unjust law.

Why, when someone pays for insurance, should that carrier than have the legal means to recoup their coverage by going after assets gained through settlement? What are the premiums for? It’s as if the insured has done something wrong by using the services the insurance carrier provides and then are punished by having to again pay for the coverage.

Could it be that those who constructed the law had the industry’s best interest in mind to the detriment of the consumer? Could those lawmakers have been influenced in some way?

Or even, could a corrupt or morally challenged administration appoint industry insiders or shills to help write the legislation for the industry and maybe even actually head the various departments designed to act as watchdogs over these industries? These watchdogs were designed for the benefit of the citizens of this country, but in these topsy-turvey times that’s being changed to benefit the industries?

Scoundrels create the culture to be able to do this sort of insider legislation, then more scoundrels construct the law, and then all those who benefit from this law fall in behind it and claim there is nothing wrong going on that they are just following the law. Turn a blind eye to the inherent corruption of the system and never mind how unfair, unbalanced, or just how wrong the law may be.

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