Here's a legitimate story:
After a collision between her minivan and a tractor-trailer five years ago, Debbie Shank now spends her days in a wheelchair in a nursing home, able to move only one arm and two fingers. Brain damage and memory loss has drained most meaningful content from her conversations with her husband of 30 years.
"She'll ask about the boys, she'll ask about the cat," says Jim Shank.
"Whenever I'm there, she thinks it must be a mealtime. We don't really hold a conversation."
Her 17-year-old son is in the Army, which she knows, but he's scheduled for deployment to Iraq next year, which she doesn't know. She also doesn't know that there is a war in Iraq.
To help compensate for the terrible injuries she received in the accident, Shank and her husband sued G.E.M. Trucking and James David Shivers, the driver who hit her, in U.S. District Court in 2000.
According to that lawsuit, Shank suffered damage to her brain stem and other injuries, and was in a coma after Shivers' tractor-trailer struck her near Cape Girardeau, Mo.
The lawsuit was settled for $900,000; after attorneys' fees and other costs, Shank's share was less than half -- just $417,477. The court set up an irrevocable trust for the money so it could only be used to pay for her long term care, and the money was sent directly there. Her husband received just over $119,000, presumably for his loss of consortium.
Before the accident, Shank had worked the night shift stocking shelves at a Missouri Wal-Mart so she could spend her days with her sons so she could be a "better mother". "It's all she ever wanted to be," her husband says. Luckily, she had gotten health insurance through her employer. It paid for her huge medical bills after the accident.
But because she later got a settlement from her lawsuit, Wal-Mart's health plan administrators demanded she repay the money her health insurance paid toward her care. To press the case, the retail giant's health plan is suing the Shanks in U.S. District Court in St. Louis. The lawsuit, filed by the Administrative Committee of the Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Associates' Health and Welfare Plan, claims that her total medical expenses exceed $469,216, and it demands that amount in return. Plus court costs to get it. Plus interest.
But wait; while Shank's settlement was $900,000, she only actually got $417,477. Shouldn't that be the limit? No, the company says: it wants all $469,216, as spelled out in its policy. So if the company wins, the amount in Shank's trust will not be enough; the family could conceivably have to come up with nearly $52,000 more than what they won in court.
Jim Shank had anticipated and feared just such an outcome. He received a letter two weeks after the accident that, he recalls, said the insurance would not cover his wife's care unless he signed over their right to lawsuit proceeds. Not surprisingly, he signed it so his wife could get the care she desperately needed to survive.
