By: Martin Merritt, esq.
Past President, Texas Health Lawyers Association
Past Chair, DBA Health Law Section
martin@martinmerritt.com
“Please Tell Me you Didn’t. . . How to Keep Clients Out of the Jailhouse, Poorhouse and Lawyers Out of the Nuthouse” -Blog
As you can tell, I love talking about health law & litigation issues, and general wellbeing, if you have any health law questions or better yet, need to refer a case, just call or drop me an email and I will happily talk.
Valentines Day. Well, here we go again, another Valentines Day. I don’t have a Valentine, but I do buy flowers for both ex-wives, half out of sentimentality and half out of the joy that comes from doing something nice. Life really isn’t that complicated, if you approach most encounters by asking, is a course of action “good or bad” for people you care about.
Then I sat down to write something thoughtful for Valentines Day, but realized, I have a big problem, I have no idea what “romance” even is anymore, let alone talk about your choices.
I was born in 1962, when the world was much simpler. We were hunter gatherers in my day, roaming the woods and fields looking for a red apple or berries. To a caveman lawyer like me, “binary” means, “Berries, good. Thorns, bad.” It follows naturally then, that “non-binary” means you can’t tell the difference between what is supposed to be good or bad.
Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer. I was warned of this, by the way 35 years ago, in a Saturday Night Live skit, “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer,” where it was prophesied that I would wake up one day “frightened and confused” by what the hell is going on?
So it came to pass that the Super Bowl telecast aired last Sunday, and in the middle of it, a commercial popped on the screen entitled, “Your Attention, Please.”
The commercial begins with a bunch of bouncy cheerleaders and for most of the next 60 seconds, it is wall-to-wall video that would make a caveman happy. We see women’s upper torsos with music that encourages our caveman brains to believe that this is going to be a “fun, fun, fun, fun, fun” experience.
But even my unfrozen caveman brain has been trained that in 2025, “don’t look, it’s a trap.” And sure enough, like a wet blanket thrown at the phonograph needle, the video cuts to “Yikes! It’s Wanda Sykes,” talking about cancer.
What are we unfrozen cavemen supposed to think about this frightening and confusing commercial? Is “fun” bad? Is caveman bad? I feel like . . .
“The Jerk.” Then I remembered my caveman lawyer training, and I knew what to do. A popular movie from 1979, The Jerk has a scene where Steve Martin’s character is upset, he tells his boss that he is no good at his job as a carnival weight guesser. The boss laughs at him and lets Martin in on the fact that the boss makes money, no matter what, because the prizes are “crap” and nowhere near as valuable as the money suckers pony up to play the game.
Which leads Martin to an epiphany, “It’s a profit deal! That takes the pressure off!” With renewed energy, he gleefully begins hawking, “get your weight guessed right here. Take a chance and win some crap.”
“It’s a profit deal!” As a health lawyer, I deal with big pharma all the time. The game is designed to make big pharma’s stock go up. Maybe the point of the commercial is to frighten and confuse people so that they are talking about it.
Meanwhile, Novartis, the company who actually paid for the bouncy Super Bowl commercial, is a pharmaceutical giant which netted $45 billion in sales last year, and which will likely hope to become even richer if the commercial motivates more testing and more cancer is found.
And the world made sense again to my unfrozen caveman lawyer brain, “It’s a profit deal!” Just good old-fashioned corporate greed, sold to us wrapped in a nice package that might actually do some good, with the intent that half the cavemen in the country can’t look away, while the other half is wagging a finger at their cavemen for falling for it.
Meanwhile, a smart cavemen might step into another room, log into E-Trade (which is so simple a baby can do it), and buy some Novartis stock. Then sneak back in, and pretend to be “frightened and confused” along with everyone else by the strange pictures coming out of the television.
Oh, and “Happy Valentines Day!”