[QuantumNomad_]

We dont know the final amount, as they settled out of court, but in 1992 a woman was awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars by the judge after receiving third degree burns from a coffee at a McDonalds.

She had originally asked for $20,000 to cover medical expenses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...

If instead this happened in another part of the world instead of the USA, I doubt that McDonalds would have had to pay much if anything in a similar situation.

And the point is that it seems that especially in the USA the companies are very avoidant of ever admitting fault for anything happening to their customers, for fear of lawsuits where they have to pay a lot of money to individual people.

[pjc50]

This is such a litmus test, this case. Yes, America does weird things with punitive damages. But the injuries were really severe and the negligence significant. More often you get class action lawsuits where everyone involved gets mailed a cheque for $3.

It's not just America. McDonald's UK got involved in the UK's biggest ever libel case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case ; leaflets distributed in 1985 ended up resulting in a human rights judgement in 2005, after a lifetime of litigation and millions spent.

[QuantumNomad_]

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case

Seems kind of an opposite situation. There it was McDonalds suing a pair of people, not the other way around. And the human rights violation was by the UK government and not McD.

[Exoristos]

McDonald's revenue in 1992 was almost $5,000,000,000.[0]

0. https://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/24/business/mcdonald-s-net-u...

[QuantumNomad_]

And yet even the $20,000 she initially asked for to cover health expenses was apparently too much according to McD execs.

[array_key_first]

I think it's about sending a message, and maybe also about ego to a lesser extent. If you pay the 20,000 you're admitting you did something wrong. Of course they did do something wrong. They did something wrong thousands, probably millions of times. And they got very lucky to only be sued once. Which is why they paid millions.

[account42]

Yes, McDonals paid one injured party out of many who may - whose injuries were not big enough or who did not have the time/money/energy for a lawsuit but whose combined damages could easily be more than hundreds of thousands.

[2ndorderthought]

When healthcare is free the amount of damages is harder to claim maybe?

[rmunn]

If healthcare is free then you aren't paying your doctors.

What you mean is "when healthcare is paid for by other people", and in that case the cost of the healthcare is still calculable.

[QuantumNomad_]

In socialist countries we have understood that it is better for the individual that everyone pays a share of what it costs to maintain a functioning healthcare system, and making it available to everyone for free.

[rmunn]

In capitalist countries, we do the same thing, except we allow people to choose whether to participate or not. (In theory, at least. The health insurance system in America is currently broken, for many reasons. A deep discussion of those reasons would almost immediately dive into ideological dispute, so I don't intend to do so.)

Actually, I do want to mention one of those reasons, which I hope won't trigger any arguments. (Though if they do, I don't intend to engage). I mention this because I think it's interesting.

A friend of mine is an emergency room doctor in a major US state. He mentioned to me once what he pays in malpractice insurance, and it was more than my annual salary as a programmer at the time (it was around 2010, and I've gotten a few raises since then). A LOT of the cost of healthcare in America is disappearing into the pockets of lawyers, more than most people realize.