In the first decision, the Court decided that women working for Wal*Mart, the evil empire personified in my opinion, can not sue over unfair labor practices as a class action because there is no evidence that Wal*Mart has a policy of paying their women less or not promoting them. Just because there is taped evidence of managers saying that they won't pay women the same, the records show that women are treated unfairly and lower courts have recognized their practices as such, the Supreme Court says all this is not enough. Now, the women can bring suit against individual stores, but their chances are slim of being successful. This opens the door for other class action suits to be dismissed and requires anyone considering a class action suit to make sure that the evidence is universal and overwhelming. Good luck.
The second and third decisions have to do with the pharmaceutical industry. The first says that the makers of generic drugs can not be sued for failing to warn people about potential risks as long as they have used the information from the name brand drug. In other words, if you use a generic prescription to keep costs down or in accordance with your health insurance and you have an adverse reaction because no one told you the reaction might occur, too bad. The second decision said that data miners have a right to obtain prescription writing information about doctors to sell to pharmaceutical companies so those companies can influence doctors to write prescriptions for their drugs. The potential with both of these decisions is that our health insurance will go up because the use of name brand prescriptions will go up, first because people want legal recourse if something bad should happen, second because the drug companies will be encouraging doctors to write name brand prescriptions. Good for the drug companies, bad for the rest of us.
Many people probably aren't too worried about these decisions. They don't work at Wal*Mart, still use generic prescriptions and the doctors in question are in Vermont. But I see a disturbing trend here. The Supreme Court, in favoring big business, is making it more difficult for the little people to get a fair deal. The Wal*Mart decision alone takes away the power from a group of people who have been wronged and given it to the large corporations. Our tax codes protect large corporations. Large corporations are now allowed to freely give money to candidates running for office, thanks to the Supreme Court. If the large corporations are allowed to have free rein in our land, who will look out for the rest of us?
