Hot dogs and defibrillators

You might think that an electronic defibrillator and a hot dog have very little in common. Well... too many hot dogs might slightly increase your need for a defibrillator some day, but that's a tenuous connection.

A little background may be needed here. An implantable defibrillator is surgically implanted in your chest, and it monitors your heartbeat. When needed, it administers a shock to restart the heart. It does automatically what we've seen doctors do when they slap the paddles on someone's chest, yell "CLEAR!", followed by the body lunging into the air. Dramatic TV, but the implantable versions just do it automatically.

A hot dog, sold by a street vendor, is a tasty, inexpensive snack, and hardly in the same technical league as a defibrillator, but they're both marvelous at filling needs. A hot dog bought from a street vendor is an on-the-move food fix. If you don't overload it with condiments, you can eat it while walking fast or driving... a meal that costs virtually no time and little money.

A defibrillator saves lives. It really is that simple - for anyone who needs one, it's like having paramedics following you 24/7... standing by, waiting for your heart to fail, and leaping into action only when needed.

Neither the hot dog nor the defibrillator is perfect... nor will they ever be. Stuff happens. It happens with everything. Living is a gamble we choose to take every day (well, some few choose to fold). Anything that can go wrong will... to somebody, no matter how tiny the risk. We each like to think that it'll happen only to someone else, and go on our merry way. At least until something does go wrong. Then the "great American gotcha" rears it's self-righteous head... we'll sue somebody.

Get a bad hot dog... sue the vendor. Get a defib that could be faulty... sue the manufacturer. Truth is, the hot dog vendor has shallow pockets, so sue the hot dog company, and/or the bun/condiments manufacturers too. The defib manufacturer has deep enough pockets to face the music alone.

On the same day, news stories appeared related to both these possibilities. Reliant corporation settled a bunch of suits about a model of their defib that sometimes could, and did, fail. No, it didn't cause death... in a tiny percentage of cases, it failed to save the life of the user.

What the news article doesn't make clear about the lead case of thousands... the 73-year-old who had his defib replaced when he read an article about the model of his defib having a small risk of failure... was that his defibrillator worked fine, but he had it surgically replaced anyway. Nevertheless, he sued Reliant... along with thousands of other people. I call that biting the hand that kept you alive so you were even able to bite.

Reliant settled for $195 million, but they still face suits from others, and government prosecutors across the nation are jumping on the bandwagon too. Such cases are a great way for prosecutors to make a political name for themselves. Boston Scientific, which purchased Reliant, has laid off a great many people that used to make defibrillators.

There are only 3 firms that manufacture the complex implantable defibrillators, and a second of the three has also settled, for $75 million, on 2,000 suits charging that their units occasionally failed. The third firm has also had recalls issued. If you can't build a perfect medical device (which is obviously impossible) then settling lawsuits for many millions just becomes a normal cost of doing business. We wonder why health care costs continue to skyrocket? Defibrillator sales are down by $400 million from last year. Evidently, many people are now afraid to take a chance on them. How many of those spooked people will die from the fear caused by the lawsuits?

and the hot dogs...

St. Paul public works department, which governs public "rights of way", normally controlling construction and repair on streets and sidewalks, decided that street vendors should also carry $2 million liability policies and pay $95/month... to "work" on the streets. Such vendors also pay a $200 license fee. As the article notes, restaurants are not required to carry liability insurance.

As is so often the case, government agencies seem to not even consider what consequences their actions will have. They think in terms of words as used in policies. If utility companies working on sidewalks should be regulated and controlled, then street vendors working on sidewalks should too. Forget that one group uses large, noisy machinery and actually poses some threat to pedestrians, while the other group doesn't. Because public works controls sidewalks, anyone working on sidewalks should be controlled.

Now... a hot dog vendor might well choose to carry liability insurance, to protect his business against accidents that might occur. Most businesses do. We typically carry liability insurance as part of our auto and homeowner policies too. But... when the city publicly requires liability coverage, it's like sending a signal to a few unscrupulous people... here's another business, right out here on the sidewalk, that now has "deep pockets" too. It's an open invitation for more lawsuits.

Notice another similarity between the defibrillator liability and the hot dog liability? Where is government's liability? Will the city also be sued if a hot dog causes a problem? They license the vendor, presumably to give some sort of assurance that he's upright and safe... why else? The FDA controls the whole process of getting a defibrillator approved for use. Compliance with FDA regulations is an extensive, expensive, never-ending process for manufacturers, supposedly to insure public safety. In the case of a problem, will either the city or the FDA be sued? Not likely. Even though they impose regulations, requirements, and fines, they don't take any responsibility, and don't share liability.

What government does do well is drive up costs of everything we buy. By doing that, they also reduce the number of suppliers of products and services. Because of government, fewer firms can afford to go through the rigmarole and expense required to sell anything. Government claims to do all that in the name of public safety, but they share NO blame when all their control and manipulation doesn't work. Does the city make hot dogs any safer? Does the FDA make defibrillators any safer? Of course they don't. They simply make them more expensive and available from fewer, larger sources.

By adding to the cost of doing business, government actually reduces safety. Money virtually wasted in complying with government controls would have otherwise been spent making products better or less expensive, in order to get more business. There's a limit on how high a vendor can price a hot dog. When government adds to the cost of each one, is a vendor more likely to use more expensive meat or less expensive? When FDA compliance adds untold millions to the cost of producing defibrillators, is the manufacturer likely to be even more careful or to concentrate on cutting manufacturing costs?

Every year, as government intrudes more into our lives, pretending to work for our benefit, it grows, consuming more tax money, producing more regulation, driving up prices, and destroying more small businesses, it also gives the public a false sense of security. Consider the irony of the suits against the defibrillator manufacturer. A device that may have already saved an individual's life several times is blamed because it might have failed to do so. Worst case is that the device did nothing and the person died... which is exactly what would have happened without the device.