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I was a juror on a very small case. A previous trial assigned guilt. Our trial was to determine damages. It was eye opening for me. We were not allowed to know things like medical bills and costs the victim incurred. We were forced to choose some number without having an basis for establishing the magnitude. I still don’t know if we were too high or too low.

If you weren't allowed to see medical bills and such, then you were probably tasked with determining other kinds of damages (e.g. emotional distress) that are totally unrelated to those.

It seems to me that medical bills would be a major contributor to distress.

How would you like it if you were a plaintiff suffering severe lifelong emotional distress but the jury saw that the medical bills were only $1000? It's not as simple as you make it out to be.

Ambulance chaser here. The most common reasons I don’t offer evidence of bills in a trial are that Medicaid paid the bill for pennies on the dollar, or the hospital wrote off the bills.

In many jurisdictions, if the Plaintiff chooses to introduce evidence of bills, they can only submit the amount still owed or actually paid to satisfy the bill, and the amount that was written off or contractually adjusted stays out.

Often, Medicaid may pay $700 on a $15,000 bill. Since the size of the bills tend to frame the non-economic damages (pain & suffering) awarded by juries, Plaintiffs’ attorneys don’t want small bill numbers to influence the juries into a minimal award. So, they just don’t introduce evidence of bills and hope that juries assume big bills or base their award on something else.

Wouldn't it then be prudent for the defendant to introduce that evidence? Do they ever do that to achieve the effect on perceived non-economic damages that you describe?

It might be, but they can’t. If plaintiff doesn’t ask for compensation for the bills then an itemized bill isn’t relevant evidence to any of the claims or defenses in the case.

> I'm entirely unconvinced that J&J couldn't pay back everything they owe, to everyone they owe it to, without bankruptcy and the fact that they were able to avoid all of those individual lawsuits is already J&J getting off the hook unfairly and avoiding their full liability.

The amount that can be awarded by a jury is uncapped, there is absolutely no way of knowing whether J&J could pay all claimants.

There won't be any amounts awarded by juries if J&J get their way and leave it all up to a single bankruptcy judge.

Once J&J has damages awarded that exceed what they cam pay, thay would the the appropriate time for the company as a whole to declare bankruptcy.

A good first step to make sure J&J can pay all their victims would be to stop paying dividends to shareholders in case they need that money for victims.

> I'm entirely unconvinced that J&J couldn't pay back everything they owe

How much is this? I thought we don't know yet since so much is still under litigation.

Which is why you shouldn't be convinced that J&J couldn't pay what they'll owe either. Maybe it will end up that I'm wrong, and the bankruptcy would be necessary, but I have no reason to think that's the case right now. Right now this looks like they're just gaming the system for their own benefit, and not simply doing their best to make sure that their victims (whose well-being they clearly didn't care about while they were being poisoned) are all paid fairly. The idea that J&J is going out their way to apply clever legal loopholes just to protect the people they've been intentionally killing is beyond absurd.