Assumption of Risk

Poor Mike Moore. Last year was supposed to be his big year – he released his magnum opus, a j’accuse of Bush admin chicanery called "Fahrenheit 911". Things started out great. Flush from winning the grand prize at Cannes, Moore managed to generate advance interest by circulating a sob story to the press about how Disney had refused to distribute the film. Of course somebody else, Lion’s Gate, picked the movie up.

Compared to his previous movie, "Bowling for Columbine", though, "F911" proved to be a disappointment. It made a lot of money, but not a fortune. Bush-haters hyped it for an Oscar, but it didn’t even end up being nominated for any. Of course it didn’t end up hurting Bush one bit. And to add insult to injury, by the end of the year more people were talking about another documentary: "Supersize Me", crunchy-granola dude Morgan Spurlock’s diary of 30 days of nothing but McDonald’s food. It’s a pretty harsh indictment of fast food: gaining almost 30 pounds was the least of the health problems documented by Spurlock. He sustained damage to the heart, liver and GI, and subjected viewers to before-and-after-weight-gain footage of himself in a pair of tiny American flag briefs. Spurlock begins "Supersize Me" by citing actual litigation against McDonald’s and asks if the fast food industry is primarily culpable for the American heart disease/diabetes/obesity epidemic. While his movie doesn’t explicitly state that it is, it certainly seems to lay blame for a lot a lot of America’s national health problems at the feet of McD’s and the rest of them.

He carefully skirts any debate on whether or not the lawsuits against McDonald’s by people claiming the restaurant chain made them fat had any merit. This is a wise move from the narrative perspective, because the debate on the assumption of personal risk in a land of glut could lend itself to several movies, and he only had time to make one. But it also begs the question – where does the culpability of the vendor end and personal responsibility begin?

While there’s no question that McDonald’s and crew don’t need to sell Supersize portions – and indeed, after the debate stirred by Spurlock’s film, they no longer do – they would have pulled the extra-huge options from the menu a long time ago if they hadn’t been selling a buttload of them. But somehow when the people pigging out on Big Macs wake up one day and realize that they weigh roughly the same as an ATV and have diabetes, they sue. The media have turned Big Tobacco into a bogeyman waiting to snatch up our children, yet millions still smoke and then sue when they get sick – even though it’s been more than 35 years since it became common knowledge that cigarettes cause cancer and other serious lung diseases. Addiction as an excuse for continued smoking is wearing thin; we’ve known since the seventies that they’re sickening, and since the eighties that they’re out-and-out deadly, yet new people, some of them very young kids but by no means all, still cultivate the habit on an almost daily basis. Of course when the butts make them sick, they sue.

For every horror story we hear about botched cosmetic surgery procedures, there are thousands more women from all backgrounds and income levels getting breast augmentations and lipo. Many women take out loans and second mortgages in hopes of hopping on the good-time, no-sweat hot-bod wagon. The risks they are assuming from getting the procedures are made clear to them from the start, but of course when something goes wrong, they sue.

All things being fair in our free-market economy, this litigation would be all well and good if the costs of it didn’t bleed over into almost every aspect of American life. The high cost of everything from health care to produce at the grocery store can be linked to the skyrocketing price of malpractice insurance. Taxes are raised when the government intervenes in a mass lawsuit against Big Tobacco. Jobs are lost when fast-food places have to cut corners to pay out litigation fees and settlements for people who ate too much of their food. Working-class parents of babies born with harelips or other facial anomalies are finding that they can’t afford the elective procedure because plastic surgeons have to pass the outrageous cost of their insurance on to their patients, who in turn can’t get insurance to pick up THEIR bill for fear of litigation.

The indulgences and lack of foresight among the few are sending shockwaves outward to the many, and everyone is losing. So how do we work towards fixing this expensive mess? It has to start with the individual. If you eat at McDonald’s every day and notice your pants starting to get tight, pass the arches by once in a while. If you want a boob job, read the fine print, visit more than one surgeon, go home and sleep on it, then read the fine print and choose a doctor, then sleep on it again. If you can’t live with the possibility that you might get more, or less, than you bargained for, don’t get the operation. And since we all know by now it can kill you, if you’re contemplating smoking, don’t start. If you smoke and you’re starting to feel like shit, quit. Contrary to what many assert, it CAN be done.

If everybody just starts looking after their own business a little better, business will be better for all of us in the long run

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