Stella and Our Conversation in the Comments

Stella blogs at SwiftSpeech. I was reading there the other day and I left a comment on this story about Walmart.

You can go read it and I'll wait right here.......or I can recap it.

A Walmart employee was horribly and tragically injured (not on the job) and her Walmart health insurance plan paid her bills. Her family hired and attorney who did not secure a settlement sufficient to pay all her bills and provide for her. Walmart performing their due diligence on behalf of all the people who pay into the health care plan sued to get back the money paid out in claims. This is called subrogation. Most insurance policies have it. I have Blue Cross and they have it. If you have claims related to an accident, your insurance company pays them and then when you settle or conclude your lawsuit, they take the money back. That way you receive your care in a timely manner and the doctors, hospitals and medical equipment companies that take care of you don't have to wait what is sometimes years to collect. The insurance plan pays out with the understanding that should you get money for those bills, they will recoup. Well in a well meaning effort to keep the family from having to pay back the money a lot of publicity was generated to portray Walmart as taking the coppers off of a dead man's eyes. It worked. Even though Walmart was on rock solid legal ground and won every court challenge.....the bad publicity wasn't worth it, so they let it go.

Now mind you, my comment was only to draw attention to the fact that the person to blame here was the attorney for the plaintiffs. While the woman and her family could not possibly have known about the clause in her policy (no one read their stuff that closely!), her attorney most certainly did. If he didn't the family should sue the attorney for malpractice.

So, Stella came over here.
"Hi Boston Maggie. Thanks for stopping by our liberal blog. OK, I knew you were a Republican from your comments about Wal*Mart."

I found this very funny. It's *Republican* to say that when a company performs a legal act and is found to have been in the right in a court of law, that you should look to the person who is wrong (the attorney)?

There was more to the comment from Stella and there is also my response. It's in the comments here.

Then we had another conversation about President Bush, but that will be another post.