this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023

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Senator Calls for DOJ Action Against Philips for Keeping CPAP Machine Complaints Secret (www.propublica.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/politics

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's times like these that I wish hell was real, because the people who knew about this and did nothing definitely deserve to go there. And to anyone that thinks "free market" could have solved this:

This is what happens when you have an unregulated "free market." The market can't self-correct if it doesn't have all the information, and these companies would have zero incentive to be voluntarily transparent.

Also note that this took 11 years for these journalists to document and publicize this naked Capitalism, and that's with regulating bodies that were at least somewhat functional well before the Trump administration. Imagine if it was solely up to journalists to covertly uncover what these companies were up to.

Capitalism is what happens when you reduce human lives to expenses on a spreadsheet and consider it a "reasonable cost" of doing business.

[–] MotoAsh 4 points 1 year ago

Capitalism is what makes people accept others placing them on a spreadsheet.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have a close relative that was killed by the Philips CPAP Machine. The lawyers for the class action recently told us that almost a billion dollars were set aside by Philips to pay out claims. It's not enough. The people at the top need be put in prison for this. Fines and monetary compensation for the families is not enough. If they do end up in prison it would be some of the most wonderful schadenfreude if someone used the money they get from the lawsuit to hire other prisoners to torture the Philips CEO's every day they are in until they can take it no more and kill themselves.

[–] rexxit 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I don't mean to seem disrespectful of the loss of your relative in any way, but how were you able to establish a causal relationship between the CPAP machine and a particular illness or death?

It's not a question based in some sort of absolvence-by-legal-technicality, but I often read accounts of grieving family members who "just know" that that MMR vaccine caused their son's autism, or that dad using a chemical occasionally in the garage "must have" caused his cancer - because it's less scary than the idea that bad health problems happen at random to people who didn't do anything to cause it.

Edit: rarely, some health condition leads to a smoking gun, but most do not. Mesothelioma is only caused by exposure to asbestos, which is why you see commercials for lawyers seeking plaintiffs for injury cases. The causal relationship is established.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

He used the Philips CPAP machines, developed lung cancer, and passed. He was otherwise healthy. He was never a smoker and worked in a grocery store. There were no other factors causing the cancer.

The doctor that diagnosed the cancer said it was most probably due to the Philips CPAP machine and recommended that we contact the attorneys handling the case. We contacted the attorneys for the class action and answered a few of their questions and provided documentation. We are now part of the class action.

It has been proven that the machines caused harm. The only thing in question is how long they knew and how much they will pay.

[–] rexxit 3 points 1 year ago

That's interesting, thanks.

[–] piecat 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

To be fair, there was no definite link for babies born with birth defects to parents who worked at Teflon and PFOA plants. Despite having a rare birth defect...

It was hard enough for the "radium girls" to prove a link between their occupation and resulting ailments. Many of them were dead by time the suit was settled.

Like you said, that causal link is going to be near impossible to prove. But we shouldn't let companies off the hook because there's a 1% chance that they could have gotten cancer without the exposure.

The problem lies in how we determine legal liability.

[–] rexxit 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Believe me when I say I'm not on corporations' side and I think they get away with all kinds of immoral shit through craftiness in the legal system, but I think that the only intellectually honest answer is that suspicious linkages are not causality, and that it should be evaluated by someone wielding scientific impartiality and robust statistical and epidemiological methods, rather than a legal process. Unfortunately courts are a shit place to evaluate science or broadly reality.

PFOA and similar precursor chemicals are one of those areas where I think it should be easy to establish elevated risk of disease with epidemiology (they probably have, but it's not my field and I haven't looked), but there are a lot of other areas that are much less clear cut. I've seen firsthand the family's emotional response to cancer being to find a villain somewhere, and it was in a case where I think no villain ever existed. People behave irrationally with mortal disease, and unfortunately some of it is just bad luck.

[–] iforgotmyinstance 10 points 1 year ago

This story is still very small, hopefully other news outlets pick it up.