
Families 'cheated of Boeing crash compensation' - dustinmoris
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-48953892
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bdamm
This is unacceptable. Boeing and the insurance companies do owe these families
more than that.

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b3lvedere
This is not the first time and will certainly not be the last time such
companies do this. I have seen a documentary where insurance people bluntly
asked relatives how much their beloved husband/wife/kid was worth.

I think it's very strange people can actually sign their rights away. That
should be illegal worldwide.

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wahern
You walk into a store, grab a beer, pay the clerk, and walk home. The moment
you finish drinking it you get a knock at the door--it's the store owner
demanding his beer back.

Version 2: a knock at the door--it's the original brewer demanding his beer
back.

The abstract notion of "contracting" your rights away isn't bad on its face.
In situations as with the crash victims, the real issue here is informational
asymmetry, and specifically that the insurers are abusing this asymmetry in a
particularly reprehensible manner. The asymmetry is that the families know
very little about how much compensation the insurer is capable of paying while
the defendant probably knows rather well the economic circumstances of the
family. And the families might be incapable--i.e. time limited, because they
lost their head of household--of expending the resources to discover this
information. By contrast, the beer example is unobjectionable because these
factors didn't exist, at least not to the same extent.

Various legal systems have mechanisms for dealing with these issues.
Categorically banning the relinquishment of rights, however, means there would
never be any finality to the exchange of goods and services, or to legal
disputes.

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b3lvedere
Agreed. Of course i meant in regard to the news item.

Products is a whole different kind of thing. I am well aware people/pets/other
living things/who knows what more might be considered products in some kind of
legal mumbo jumbo.

In regard to the news item: The company bloody well knows how vurnable and
unstable these people are. The company also knows it can actually legally
persue this morally and ehtically bottom low tactic in order to pay as less as
possible and maximise profit as much as possible. That is a well known process
for many years.

So, in order to protect these people from these processes it should be made
illegal to sign away rights. Maybe a cool down period is more than enough, but
there needs to be some form of protection from this process.

