So my faith in Americans not being money-hungry opportunists has been restored.
Remember that law suit against McDonald’s way back when? How that woman sued the company after she had hot coffee (title!) spilled all over her lap while in the car? Ok, so tell me-what details do you remember from the articles written about it? Well, you’ve most likely been incredibly misinformed. Maybe not deliberately, but it’s happened.
Want to know what really happened? What happened was that in a stationary car, that woman (actually an old lady) was sitting in the passenger seat, and suffered third degree burns all over her lower extremities. Due to the seat essentially being a bucket, and her not being as nimble as she once was, she sat in that 180 degree coffee, scalding her skin almost beyond repair for almost two minutes. She and her family wanted two things from McDonald’s-to lower the standing temperature of the coffee and for roughly $800USD so they could finish her treatments at the hospital (skin grafts included).
McDonald’s said no. And then the law suit that changed the whole nature of law suits to this very day happened. And the world has never quite been the same, now has it?
America and it’s citizens have gained this reputation of playing the ‘Law Suit Lottery’, hoping for a large pay day for something that seems a little trivial, but was super traumatising. You know, like they lost a night’s sleep over it. Oooh, scary.
But here’s the thing (and yes, I know-it’s a documentary, everything should be taken with a massive grain of salt, but it’s also produced by HBO Films, so I’m probably putting way too much stock into it, but I don’t care)-yes, people did start to take advantage of the courts and some people, unjustly, got a massive pay day out of it. So large companies started in on the American government to be protected from these fraudulent claims. Justly so, in some cases.
Suing them Old School...
But now who’s protecting the citizens being wronged by these corporations? No one. As a result of these suits, almost all companies and states have various ‘caps’ on how much a company actually ends up having to pay you. For example-the jury awards you $8 million, but after everyone’s gone home, and the cap comes into play, you end up with less than half of that-most of it going to court and lawyer fees, and then how much are you left with to take care of yourself? Not much. .
However, I’m not here to lecture you all (what-two of you?) about the legal system in the states. Instead of me fumbling through what legal jargon I managed to pick up from the film, let me tell you why I liked it instead (you know, the purpose of this blog...).
Hot Coffee was informative, entertaining, and one of the most creative documentaries I’ve seen in a long time. It explained while not dumbing down information for its audience, and gave me the general feeling I like to pair with watching a documentary-rage. Well, not just rage, but really-I had some of that as well. My heart pumped faster, I felt enlightened, while at the same time, appalled at the world, at the very people in government who are meant to protect us, the people who pay them to, who would rather pander to large corporations, who in turn like to ‘help out’ with any re-elections going on.
I feel like I’ve found my new OutFoxed. And it’s fantastic. I highly recommend this, if only to try to prove me and my beliefs wrong, to poke holes in the stories given.
There are three main stories we follow in Hot Coffee-I’ve pretty much given you the low down on one of them. Make sure you stick around to watch the rest of them, and see how you feel the next time you read an article in the paper about a ‘trivial’ law suit against a giant corporation (ooh, hello relevance to Rupert Murdoch!).
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