By early 1982, it became clear that the asbestos law liabilities of the American construction products industry and their insurance companies were going to be mind-boggling. There had been other, massive influxes of product liability personal injury cases before (the most notable up to that time was probably DES, a morning-sickness remedy that mesothelioma caused birth defects to the children of the mothers who took it), but nothing on this scale.
Excess level insurance companies (an excess policy for a business is something akin to the "umbrella" coverage offered to individuals on home and/or automobile policies) with low reserves suddenly found themselves being told to fork over millions, which they mesothelioma sometimes couldn’t come up with. (A rough analogy with automobile insurance would be if every insured driver in the country, on the same day, got into a massive accident. The system would collapse, because its financial foundations were engineered under the premise that most policyholders don’t get into accidents, at least not at the same time).
Severe asbestosis and pleural thickening are horrendously debilitating diseases. The victim is essentially strangled, over a long period of time, by his own lung tissue. In addition, these diseases, after the onset of significant findings on X-ray and pulmonary mesothelioma function testing, are generally progressive — you keep getting worse, even though the asbestos exposure has stopped. As a result, at least in some parts of the country, verdicts in these cases tended to be quite large, even in cases where the objective findings of the mesothelioma disease were arguably minimal or hotly contested.
No comments:
Post a Comment