Everyone thinks they have the right to judge, and use the massive amounts of available information to do so, even if they haven’t been trained to judge.
It's not about judging. We are socializing the losses to the public and capitalizing the profits for the already wealthy.
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.
0. https://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/24/business/mcdonald-s-net-u...
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.
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.
What you mean is "when healthcare is paid for by other people", and in that case the cost of the healthcare is still calculable.
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.