Hot Coffee - The Movie

[Jared]

Anybody seen it?  Just watched it and was pleasantly surprised.  It spends the first chunk of the movie on the McDonalds case (there are pictures of an old lady's nether regions - you've been warned...) but then moves on to spend the bulk of the time on broader topics within the legal system.  Pretty interesting.

[Greg]

Haven't seen it, but a quick glance over at imdb.com tells me a lot. Looks like it's another "corporations bad, people good" documentary.    Am I close? 

McDonald's sold the woman a hot cup of coffee. Their contract obligations ended at that point.
If I take a Toro lawn mower and use it cut my hair, it's not Toro's fault if I cut myself.

[gdawgs]

litigation is needed to keep people held accountable, but this case was insanely ridiculous. 

reminds me of one of the reasons why doctors don't charge less because their malpractice insurance bill is huge. 

[Jared]

Haven't seen it, but a quick glance over at imdb.com tells me a lot. Looks like it's another "corporations bad, people good" documentary.    Am I close? 

McDonald's sold the woman a hot cup of coffee. Their contract obligations ended at that point.
If I take a Toro lawn mower and use it cut my hair, it's not Toro's fault if I cut myself.

It's got a bit of that sentiment, also makes some really good observations on the real-world impact of tort reform, campaign finance practices, and binding arbitration clauses.  The binding arbitration part was most interesting because it is virtually impossible to live life and conduct business without implicitly or explicitly agreeing to these clauses.

On the obligation part, one part of the documentary focused on the fact that McDonalds had received 700 complaints prior to this incident from others who were burned by their coffee.  They probably sell 50M cups of coffee world wide a day so 700 is a relatively small number, but when does it become their responsibility to take action (safer cups, lower temps etc) based on the information they had available?  The fact that they were serving a product which is intended to be ingested at a temperature that causes damage to body tissue is what differentiates this from the lawnmower example for me.

[Jared]

litigation is needed to keep people held accountable, but this case was insanely ridiculous. 

reminds me of one of the reasons why doctors don't charge less because their malpractice insurance bill is huge. 

Check out the movie.  It covers the "hype" of the jury award and also the impact of tort reform on the cost of medical care.  The example from the movie was TX, where tort reform capped medical malpractice punitive damages at $250k but the cost of healthcare continued to rise at a faster rate than the rest of the country.  Clearly there were other things contributing to this (obesity in the south being the big one) but it's not as direct a relationship as you'd think.