Peter writes:
“John Edwards had the audacity to charge for his services [....] Edwards and other civil attorneys provide services. They’ve found a market for their services. Some of them, the good ones, earn a healthy living at it. Bad ones struggle.”
Quite right, and I will look for this same defense of wealth and valuable services rendered to be equally applied to businesses and wealthy individuals everywhere … large corporations, Republicans, and political conservatives included.
Strangely enough, however, Peter was only recently somewhat less forgiving of local landlords who took the opportunity of a promised tax increase to implement a rate increase of their own – an action which I believe Peter referred to (perjoratively and somewhat disgustedly) as “profiteering”.
Rental property owners, most of whom locally make less collectively in a year with hundreds or even thousands of rental properties than did Mr Edwards personally in a single legal “settlement”, provide a very real, and very needed service.
That is, providing a place to live for people without the capital means to purchase their own – and this often in spite of neanderthal-like tenents who seem to believe that someone else’s property is theirs to personally tear up.
Landlords, like the owners of taverns and smoking-permitted restaurants, provide services. They’ve found a market for their specific services, and for the environment that they choose to provide them in.
Some of them, the good ones, earn a healthy living at it. Bad ones struggle, and some lose it all in the effort.
Similarly, pharmaceutical companies (a term considered nearly as perjorative as “lawyer”) will invest huge sums of money in speculatively delivering a “service”, or that of new and better drugs, often for treating previously un-treatable diseases.
In some cases, the research and the clinical trials pan out, and researchers find a substance that has some positive effect, that people are willing to pay enough for, to justify their time and investment.
More often than not, they don’t – which means that the profits from the few must pay for the attempted development of them all.
In an increasingly litigious society, the services of a competent legal practitioner can be a blessing. Even the guilty deserve a vigorous defense.
Hopefully the greatest percentage of those in the business of legal representation are honest, ethical, straightforward men and women, who seek only to help, and not to take undue financial advantage of a difficult and painful situation.
The contingency process of course enables many people to access legal services they could not otherwise afford, by shifting financial risk to the legal professional – who accepts the case based on his or her best judgement as to the chances of winning a financial settlement that will adequately compensate them for their professional time and financial investment in pursuing it.
While many of Mr Edward’s clients did indeed achieve what they believed they were justly due for the wrongs they suffered (real and or imagined), and while Mr Edwards did indeed receive merely his “fair share” of the booty, as mutually agreed to in advance by his clients (who of course, risked very little), one must also keep in mind that companies and corporations do not pay the costs of such generous settlements – individuals do.
In Mr Edward’s case, this means the insurance companies of the companies or doctors he sued, which ultimately means the customers of the companies, or the patients of those doctors.
Which ultimately means higher costs of health care for you and me, and which may mean even less health care in the long run, as some medical professionals decide that the hassles and the risks of doing business are no longer worth their time.
Does it equal “safer medicine”? Maybe. There are unethical, incompetent, greedy doctors, just like there are unethical, incompetent, greedy attorneys.
Legal recourse (presuming that we do still actually enforce “laws” in this country – even if only against legal residents and citizens) is a necessary, if occasionally unfair alternative to angry mobs with torches and pitchforks.
If you know a doctor or two, I’ll be that you know of at least one who has been unfairly targeted by (and lost) a bogus “malpractice” lawsuit, just for doing his or her job in the best manner they knew how – and just because the patient or their family needed someone to blame when life dealt them a bad hand.
And even if they DIDN’T lose, there’s the substantial (and irrecoverable) cost of mounting a defense, and the undeserved damage to their own professional reputation and career.
In most cases, it is not the “compensatory damages” or cost-of-care claims that result in the multi-million-dollar settlements anyway. It’s the subjective “pain and suffering”, or the kick-me-when-I’m-down “punative” damages.
So does Mr Edwards “deserve” his hard-won legal millions? Sure, why not. It’s a free country (sort of), Mr Edwards engaged in a legal enterprise (pun intended), and he won according to clearly established rules of proceedure, under the ruling of a legitimately-established judicial body with recognized jurisdiction in the case.
Sort of like Mr Bush in 2001 … but I digress …
So all in all, if I were a medical professional anywhere near the Edwards’ case, I’d still be checking the fine print of my insurance policies, and making sure that my premiums were fully paid up ….
Once a predatory animal has sampled human flesh, they say he never quite loses his taste for it.
Having had the audacity to charge for OUR services however , each in our own (hopefully valuable) little field of professional endeavor, does not apparently mean that we are each equally as entitled to KEEP it – as Mr Edwards’ tendency to favor taxation as a favored wealth-redistribution tool would seem to indicate.
Redistribution of wealth – no doubt excepting his own, of course. That would be wrong.
http://forums.wausaudailyherald.com/viewtopic.php?p=8837&highlight=#8837
