Asking as a Romanian, I’m genuinely curious. In my almost 32 years of life, I’ve never had any experiences with police / courts and either have the people around me. Here the philosophy is you avoid the police / court system like the plague and deal with problems interpersonally. The less the government / government agencies in your life, the best. But Americans seem to be the complete opposite: “lawsuit waiting to happen”, “sue them”, “call the police”, “contact X governmental agency”, etc. these are all things I see online. I just don’t understand why you’d want all of that in your life, it’s like inviting trouble + waste of time and money.

  • tunetardis@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    11 days ago

    I had a chat with my American relatives at one point which began with me asking why it seems medical malpractice suits have such soaring high settlements compared to where I am in Canada? They explained it to me like this. Say a botched procedure leaves you requiring constant medical treatments for the rest of your life. You have to sue for any treatments you would otherwise have to pay out of pocket. Where you have a public healthcare system, the state would cover that. You may still sue for loss of employment if you are no longer able to work, say, but settlements tend to be orders of magnitude higher because of those additional costs. Unfortunately, this leads to a proliferation of bottom-feeding personal injury lawyers who try to get you to litigate and overstate your injuries to get bigger settlements.