{"id":2603,"date":"2005-08-16T14:36:00","date_gmt":"2005-08-16T14:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=2603"},"modified":"2018-02-11T16:28:16","modified_gmt":"2018-02-11T22:28:16","slug":"wal-mart-hands-its-critics-a-spiked-club-asks-please","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2005\/08\/16\/wal-mart-hands-its-critics-a-spiked-club-asks-please\/","title":{"rendered":"Wal-Mart Hands Its Critics a Spiked Club, Asks, "Please?""},"content":{"rendered":"

Insurer wants woman’s crash settlement<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\nDebbie Shank stocked shelves at a Wal-Mart store in Cape Girardeau, Mo., until five years ago, when her minivan was hit by a tractor-trailer. Her Wal-Mart health insurance paid the medical bills. Proceeds from a lawsuit helped finance her care in a nursing home.<\/p>\n

Brain damage forces her to use a wheelchair and limits her upper body movement to one arm and two fingers. It stole her memory and her ability to talk to her husband and three sons.<\/p>\n

“She’ll ask about the boys, she’ll ask about the cat,” said her husband, Jim Shank. “Whenever I’m there, she thinks it must be a mealtime. We don’t really hold a conversation.”<\/p>\n

Now the Shanks face a new obstacle. Her Wal-Mart health insurance plan wants the lawsuit money to repay its costs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Unfortunately, some insurance company functionaries lack the imagination for how the general public will perceive a lawsuit against a disabled woman, and how anti-Wal-Mart fanatics will use the incident against Wal-Mart. If those opponents could have their way, they’d make sure that Wal-Mart lived down to their rhetoric and did not provide insurance for its employees (the fact that Wal-Mart medical insurance exists and paid out half a million dollars for this catastrophe, but that Wal-Mart is evil because it doesn’t provide insurance for its employees–the paradox in their rhetoric will never surface).<\/p>\n

The paper throws in an obligatory response from a spokesperson:<\/p>\n

A Wal-Mart spokesman said the health plan has made no decision on whether to pursue this case; the suit puts a legal foot in the door before the deadline to file it passes. “This is kind of a standard procedure, and it just preserves our options,” Marty Hires said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The SOPs of the byzantine and, let’s face it, often-suspect insurance and legal industry don’t improve the image of insurance, lawyers, or their clients. I’m sure someone with Wal-Mart could have come up with a better response, but who knows if the papers would publish them, because the current storyline casts Wal-Mart as the villain.<\/p>\n

Now that the broken story’s broken, any doing-of-the-right-thing by Wal-Mart–such as not actually pursuing the suit or apologizing, will be reported as cynical damage control. If the papers follow up at all.<\/p>\n

Yeah, I’m so cynical, I sometimes don’t even trust my own blog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Insurer wants woman’s crash settlement: Debbie Shank stocked shelves at a Wal-Mart store in Cape Girardeau, Mo., until five years ago, when her minivan was hit by a tractor-trailer. Her Wal-Mart health insurance paid the medical bills. Proceeds from a lawsuit helped finance her care in a nursing home. Brain damage forces her to use […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2603"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19429,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2603\/revisions\/19429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}