Yesterday the news leaked out that Wal-Mart has decided to drop its "duning" of Debbie Shank. This is good news, but one wonders if the hindquarters will offer to pay this poor woman’s legal expenses.
I received a comment to my Wal-Mart post that suggests in essence that Wal-Mart is perfectly within their rights to reclaim medical costs paid out by their associates plan if the injured party receives any compensation from legal action.
That’s true. All the more shame on our phony corporatized medical insurance system. Apparently the ugliness of profiteering and post-modern utilitarianism has gotten into the nation’s drinking water like diet pills and tranquilizers.
I once went to the Reichstag in Berlin to see an exhibit of Nazi atrocities. Films of Goebbels whipping up the masses in favor of pogroms and murder; school books depicting deformed people as shackles on the state’s money supply; photographs of goose steppers. But the most chilling display in that vast legislative hall–which as students of history will all remember was burned down by Hitler shortly after he got a hold of the keys to the kingdom–was a single typed page illuminated under glass. The page looked like any other office memo. It was properly signed and initialed. It put into legalese the order to exterminate the Jews.
Legalese is either a force for social progress or it’s the lingua franca for what Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil".
Wal-Mart discovered that even though Americans are doped on religion, sex, and TV (as John Lennon once said) they’re not entirely disposed to seeing people destroyed for profit.
If a legal settlement is large enough to pay back a health insurance system but not large enough to leave a profoundly impaired person with the hope of living in dignity, then the issue is human dignity, not profits.
Our ancestors are still weeping.
S.K.
LINKS:
Planet of the Blind 