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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

> My question is - should taxpayers be on hook for the millions he is looking for?

One of the reasons people in this situation sue for millions of dollars is because it can take millions of dollars to cover their medical expenses for the rest of their life. Maybe the whole system would work better if the taxpayers covered this medical care upfront rather than this circuitous route of only paying for the medical care after a lawsuit. The current system seems to be working for no one.

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The part of the system that is not working is the part where people feel they can get excessively drunk without sufficient consequences to incentivize them to not get excessively drunk.

Edit: apparently, it is not conclusively proven the person in this incident was drunk.

Whether he was drunk or not is irrelevant to the root of the problem. Having a life altering accident like this in the United States cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. That puts people in a situation in which their only hope is to sue someone. It doesn't matter who is actually at fault. Fault isn't the motivating factor. The motivating factor is that people need money to pay for their care and a lawsuit is the most realistic way to get that money.

In any country, someone would have to pay for that very expensive care.

Even somewhere with 'free' government healthcare, it's still the taxpayers who pay.

But they'd pay a lot, lot less in a more efficient system that wasn't ruthlessly optimized in about 20 ways for max profit and nothing else.

Do you have some data on that? My assumption is that removing costly litigation could save money, but I haven't seen any case studies on it.

Sure. The US pays far more than other first-world countries for health care and gets much worse health outcomes out of it. This is very well documented.

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...

https://healthsystemsfacts.org/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/08/08/how-us...

I'm aware of that stuff from the general healthcare standpoint. I'm asking about from healthcare expenses from these sorts of lawsuits. I'm wondering if just having costs covered would prevent the suits from happening or if people would still go after pain/suffering, lost wages, etc. It seems I didn't understand that you were just talking about the healthcare part.

I'm not clear on the distinction you are trying to make with this comment. I said the taxpayers should pay in my first comment. I'm not pretending this care would be free.

I will agree that making individuals responsible for excessive healthcare costs would be inefficient, but I think the current system with out of pocket maximums should be able to handle this.

What the current system needs to be tweaked to do is provide more subsidies do everyone has insurance (and a mandate for everyone to buy it, in lieu of additional taxes for single payer).

This is also gets baked into the high cost of auto insurance, which is mandated by the government.

Why should I be responsible for his medical care?

I think the idea would rather be that you would pay 5 cents a year towards his medical care, rather than have to pay all of it.

Oh good, so if everyone pays 5 cents a year we can all get millions of dollars of medical care. I’m not good at math, but makes perfect sense to me!

gee, the comment I responded to said "Why should I be responsible for his medical care?" in the context of a lawsuit where the 'his' under discussion got injured.

Then I said "I think the idea would rather be that you would pay 5 cents a year towards his medical care, rather than have to pay all of it." meaning that while the settlement for the lawsuit might be millions of dollars it will in fact not end up impoverishing the parent poster.

But for some reason you seem to think that it was about some other situation than the one under discussion here? I hope this summary has clarified the chain of very short messages for you, so that you no longer need labor under this evident misapprehension.

Morally: Because he's a human being.

Financially: It's a lot more efficient for society to cover all health care that's proven to be cost-effective regardless of who needs it or why. Putting gates on who is allowed to receive benefits costs more than it saves.

I tried to make it easy to read between the lines of my comment. I wasn't talking about his medical care. I was talking about everyone's medical care. And regarding that, there is a quote that has turned into somewhat of a meme that goes "I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people." Either you care about people in this situation or not. If you don't care, nothing I'm going to say will convince you to care.

Even people who generally care can reach a point where they don't want to, or simply can't. Stuff like the distractions of their own problems can prevent them from seeing larger societal solutions.

The tax payers are already on the hook for it if he is awarded damages from the city.

And the tax payers will pay for it if he runs out of money to pay too and it becomes emergency care and eventually a bad medical debt.

You shouldn't be personally, but collectively as a society we should try to look out for each other as a general moral rule, instead of a "me first" pure capitalistic mindset.

Same reason that we try to help the homeless, the less fortunate, etc.

Why should I be responsible for your education?

This article is about a adult man who was on drunk, on drugs, and driving an electric vehicle on a public sidewalk. How is this comparable to public education?

I wonder what the breakdown of costs are after SS disability and Medicare.

I do agree that costs at a case level could be lower without litigation, but I wonder what the overall cost would come out to. Basically, someone's paying for the care, but the question is how does, or what, shuffling of which bucket it comes out of will be beneficial?

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