One of the more dangerous side effects of the toxic legal-medical tangle over breast implants has been the growing skittishness it inspires among makers and suppliers of the raw material silicone, who fear, not entirely without basis, that they could somehow be drawn into liability cases based on these or other silicone devices. Were this skittishness to get too widespread, representatives of the industries that make silicone and other "biomaterials" keep warning, companies might pull out of the business of supplying them, leading to life-threatening shortages of such devices as replacement joints and shunts to drain liquid.
That argument is the basis for legislation recently introduced in both House and Senate at the urging of big biomaterials companies-not just Dow Chemical, which has been sued in connection with breast implants, but such chemical giants as DuPont-to create liability protection for the makers of biomaterials, except under certain circumstances of willful harm.
You could argue that these fears are overblown, particularly in the wake of several court rulings that breast implant victims may not sue for or recover damages from Dow Chemical Co., parent company of implant maker Dow Coming Corp. and a major developer of silicone before its use in breast implants was contemplated. Still, justified or not, companies' fears of liability can set off unmanageable ripples.
What's interesting about these bills is that both include a so-called "carve-out' provision stipulating that none of the protections in the new law would apply to breast implants. This is because, as supporters of the bill agree, years of efforts to get a hearing on the biomaterials problem have gone nowhere out of fears that such liability protection could become, or simply appear to be, a back-door way of clearing the makers of breast implants.
The legislation, sponsored by Sens. Joseph Lieberman and John McCain, has been pushed with a fanfare by medical supply groups that point to new surveys of worried companies and predict disaster if the bill is not passed. Besides patching a problem, passing the measure would have an added advantage: It would take a genre of otherwise unrelated horror stories and object lessons off the table and out of the debate still raging on implants' safety and liability. Just for that, it may be worth doing. The implant fiasco has far too many extraneous matters mixed up in it already.
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