442
Opinion of the Court
Cancer Society anyway"); id., at 164 (testimony by Buckley's expert declining to rule out that periodic chest X rays would likely benefit smokers such as Buckley, even in the absence of asbestos exposure). Buckley's sole expert, then, was equivocal about the need for extra monitoring, and the defense had not yet put on its case.
Moreover, tens of millions of individuals may have suffered exposure to substances that might justify some form of substance-exposure-related medical monitoring. See supra, at 434-435. (The dissent limits its class of potential plaintiffs to employees suing their employers, see post, at 454, but other exposed individuals who satisfy the Paoli test, see post, at 449-450, could sue—at common law.) And that fact, along with uncertainty as to the amount of liability, could threaten both a "flood" of less important cases (potentially absorbing resources better left available to those more seriously harmed, see supra, at 435-436) and the systemic harms that can accompany "unlimited and unpredictable liability" (for example, vast testing liability adversely affecting the allocation of scarce medical resources). The dissent assumes that medical monitoring is not a "costly" remedy, see post, at 451 (internal quotation marks omitted). But Buckley here sought damages worth $950 annually for 36 years; by comparison, of all claims settled by the Center for Claims Resolution, a group representing asbestos manufacturers, from 1988 until 1993, the average settlement for plaintiffs injured by asbestos was about $12,500, and the settlement for nonmalignant plaintiffs among this group averaged $8,810. See App. in Amchem Products, Inc. v. Windsor, O. T. 1996, No. 96-270, p. 578.
Finally, a traditional, full-blown ordinary tort liability rule would ignore the presence of existing alternative sources of payment, thereby leaving a court uncertain about how much of the potentially large recoveries would pay for otherwise unavailable medical testing and how much would accrue to plaintiffs for whom employers or other sources (say, insurance now or in the future) might provide monitoring in any
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