[vba616]

Do you have a good, unbiased sample of instances of people injured by businesses?

Any random major corporation is dealing with hundreds if not thousands of lawsuits at any given moment. They can, and do, wreck the lives of thousands of people without it even being significant enough to report in SEC filings, let alone spark a journalist's interest.

And then there are all the injuries and deaths that lead to consulting a lawyer who says the life lost isn't worth enough to make a lawsuit practical. If you don't assess the number of these, it's pretty hard to say how friendly things are for personal injury lawsuits.

[WalterBright]

I'm not referring to corporations wrecking the lives of people. I'm referring to people accidentally injuring themselves and going for the jackpot lawsuit against any entity nearby with lots of money to extract.

[vba616]

My point was that what you are referring to does not represent personal injury in the US. You can be angry at specific instances like you describe, but it's totally unrepresentative.

In my opinion, which is not based on expertise as such, but having worked in the corporate litigation industry, and having had friends of friends and family injured and killed by corporations and businesses.

[WalterBright]

> having had friends of friends and family injured and killed by corporations and businesses

One wonders what profession these people are in. Also, being in the litigation industry, I'm sure you know that injuring and killing someone is a crime. I'm talking about accidents here.

[vba616]

>One wonders what profession these people are in.

Both people I'm thinking of were victims of interactions as consumers (of medical services/products), not employees, as it happens.

In one case, the lack of a lucrative career factored directly into the futility of litigation.

In the other, the harm was largely that a medication side effect led to impulsive decisions that undermined a good career and other relationships, and would've been difficult to prove in court.

How do I know this latter was real? Because I coincidentally know there was a massive lawsuit on behalf of victims less ambiguous.

>Also, being in the litigation industry, I'm sure you know that injuring and killing someone is a crime

I am not a lawyer, and I'm not "in the litigation industry" for some years now. However, it's a strange thing to say that injuring or killing someone is always a crime. It's frequently not even a tort. Have you known nobody that's died due to a doctor's mistake? A prescription medication? Seen a "death panel" at a nursing home?

>I'm talking about accidents here.

Sure, and so was I. I mean, you can never really be certain, especially in the many cases that don't get litigated. That's why discovery is a thing, I think. Many, many cases just don't meet cost/benefit criteria and are never filed.

I like repeating this no matter how much I get downvoted each time: medical errors are one of the leading causes of death, behind only one or two like cancer. They are vastly underestimated by most people because there is no diagnostic nor billing code for fuck-ups. Anyone who's worked anywhere near the medical/insurance industry knows how everything revolves around codes, so it had a bitter ring of truth to me when I first read a certain article from Johns Hopkins.

[WalterBright]

Actually, I'm aware of the deadly mistakes that go on in the medical industry. A friend of mine's mother was killed in a hospital by administering the wrong drug. They could learn a lot from the aviation industry in how to minimize human error.

The software industry could also learn from the aviation industry, I've blathered on about this for years :-/