Tangent from another thread, because it's obvious here and the lawyer bashing greed bashing seems to be overlooking some important actual motives involved:
Shortly after this, I was hit with a lawsuit.. I had broken 1 of his ribs in my attempt to save his life... It was dismissed.
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the reason given is she said she has bad insurance and an ambulance would cost her $1,500,
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Moreover, none of them prevent you from being sued. They only prevent you from being sued successfully. But as many already know, the fact of having to defend yourself from a lawsuit in the first place (especially one with significant backing) can itself be more than enough punishment to deter would-be helpers.
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decided that it was perfectly reasonable to allow attorneys to advertise. It's been all downhill since then. "Litigious society" is one of the most often-used sound-bites for describing contemporary America. If something goes wrong, it's never bad luck, it absolutely has to be somebody else's fault, and by the goddess we're going to find him and make him pay for it--while the lawyers on both sides of the case get rich.
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goes to the pharmacy to get medicine her brother needs ASAP. There's some screw up with the insurance and, instead of the twenty dollar co-pay she usually pays, the pharmacists says it will cost like $150.
The common factor, the "significant backing" that forces even unlikely lawsuits, the desperation and coercion that seem far more often involved than greed (who do these lawsuit filers expect to collect huge sums
from?), is the US system of private medical insurance.
To observe, from above example: If you are someone who has been saved from death by cardiac arrest at the cost of a broken rib, finding a lawyer and filing a lawsuit against an otherwise commendable stranger whose financial circumstances you don't even know (for what? the temporary discomfort of rib-healing?) is an odd and unmotivated act - and few lawyers would take on such an unlikely source of significant payment, all else being equal; of
course it's likely to be simply dismissed, and even countersuit is possible if the target has enough money to be worth it in the first place - or their own, relevant insurance, from a company with its own lawyers.
If an insurance company is involved, that's what their retainer-paid lawyers are for - tapping all possible sources of payment for medical care. The dismissal rate is just a calculated expense of an overall profitable strategy. If you are a patient whose insurance coverage depends on you having made good faith efforts to cooperate in such tapping (and you are, if you have private insurance), you are faced with significant coercion.
And so forth. Hence, in large part: the lawyers, the hassle, the risk, and the underlying motive of damaging, even crushing, personal cost.
People living in countries with First World medical care don't generally
have things like "insurance screwup" and "bad insurance" and "dollar short" experiences - or the ballooning of medical costs and army of lawyers such circumstances inevitably bring. The ethical situation here is not solely a personal or immediate situational one, nor are the personal character flaws of others (even lawyers) the only significant issue.
