What Does Mac and Cheese Have to Do With Medicine?
–Healthcare isn’t immune from the influence of America’s litigious culture
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, The Washington Post published an article about a South Floridian woman who filed a lawsuit against the Kraft Heinz Co. for false advertising. The lawsuit alleges that the company’s Velveeta mac and cheese cups take longer than 3.5 minutes to prepare. The instructions on the back of the box, the plaintiffs say, call for 3.5 minutes of microwave time alone. The time it takes to tear open the lid and stir the ingredients together are not taken into account, and therefore the product’s packaging is deceptive.
The class action suit, led by plaintiff Amanda Ramirez, is asking Kraft to pay $5 million in damages for deceptive and unfair trade practices. The lawyers say there are probably more than “100 victims” spread across multiple states where the product is sold.
The reason why the story is so compelling, and has been amplified by many social media platforms, is that it possesses shock appeal — it grabs our attention and elicits a visceral reaction. Perhaps it even offends our moral instincts. We say to ourselves, “That’s absurd,” or “That’s ridiculous,” or “I can’t believe it.” Deep within our collective guts, we have a sense that the complaint lacks merit, and so it gnaws at our sense of right and wrong.
So, you’re probably asking yourself, how does this mac and cheese complaint pertain to the subject of medicine? How does it relate to the glut of malpractice lawsuits in the U.S.?
In my opinion, cases like these that garner national attention trickle into our collective subconsciousness. They influence our attitude toward litigiousness. When a person suffers an apparent medical insult or injury, whether or not they decide to take legal action is partly determined by the cultural milieu in which they live.
Now, let me be clear, I’m all for defending individual consumers against unchecked corporate power. The country and the world are a better place as a result of our protections under state and federal law. However, there is a tipping point where the law can be co-opted and misused as an instrument for personal reward rather than as a protective mechanism. Perhaps this case represents such an inflection point.
One of the attorneys representing the case, Spencer Sheehan, who is based in Great Neck, New York, has filed over 400 similar food and beverage product cases in recent years. According to NPR, he has “almost single-handedly caused a historic spike in the number of class action lawsuits against food and beverage companies.”
He told the outlet, “I guess I’ve always been the type who would become annoyed [and] never liked it when companies cheated people for small amounts it would be difficult to recoup.”
While some of the lawsuits he has filed must have met the legal standard to proceed, in my opinion the pattern of lawsuits suggests that he’s using our legal system’s protection of individual consumer rights to his advantage — filing a large number of class action lawsuits (which are often taken on a contingency basis) and seeing if any of them stick.
There are very few consequences for law firms that operate in this manner. If a complaint is truly frivolous, the plaintiff’s lawyer can be sanctioned by the court, amongst other things. However, “frivolous” is a very difficult legal standard to meet, even if the plaintiff’s case is weak.
Now imagine, for example, how a person who believes they suffered a minor, medical injury might process this story. Their logic could run something like this: “If a multinational company such as Kraft Heinz Co. is forced to payout $5 million for miscalculating the time it takes to make instant mac and cheese, then I am certainly well within my rights to sue my physician. Even though I like my doctor, and I’m not sure whether or not they made a mistake during my procedure, he or she has insurance, so nobody really gets hurt if I sue.”
Even if this precise reasoning does not occur in the mind of a potential litigant, the mac and cheese story — and others like it — can influence our societal attitude. It adds gasoline to the contentious flames we see burning all around us every day: on personal injury billboards, on television commercials, and on public transportation advertisements.
I’m not hopeful that the American attitude toward litigiousness will change anytime soon. In the meantime, perhaps all we can do is point out that even if a complaint may possess enough legal merit to be heard in a court of law, bringing it forward may have a detrimental, cumulative effect on the culture in which we live.
With that being said, I think it’s time for me to prepare myself a piping hot bowl of mac and cheese, which always seems to brighten up my dour outlook.
Eric Dessner, MD is an ophthalmologist in Brooklyn, New York. He is CEO and founder of www.medmic.com.
This article was originally published by www.medpagetoday.com on December 16th, 2022.