- Hit by stray bullet, wakes from anesthesia fighting, hospital told to pay $17 million [Georgia; Insurance Journal]
- Study: physician’s previous paid claims history has no impact on odds of catastrophic med-mal payout [Bixenstine et al, JHQ via PoL] Overall, med-mal payouts have fallen steadily in past decade; $3.6 billion figure last year follows strongly regionalized pattern with top per capita figures all in Northeast [Diederich analysis of annual payouts via TortsProf] Florida law now requires that testifying medical witness be in same specialty as defendant [Business Week]
- In lawsuits alleging “wrongful birth,” what’s the measure of damages? [Gerard Magliocca, Concurring Opinions]
- ObamaCare exchanges in D.C., California and Connecticut declare smoking “pre-existing condition,” say insurers can’t base higher rates on it [Kevin Williamson, NR]
- “The Crime of Whitening Teeth with Over-the-Counter Products” [Caleb Brown, Bluegrass Institute]
- How not to die: Jonathan Rauch on end-of-life overtreatment [The Atlantic]
- “I’m going to start a rumor that Sudafed is an abortifacient. Then the feds will finally have to allow reasonable access to it.” [me on Twitter]
Tagged as:
Florida,
Georgia,
hospitals,
medical malpractice,
medical malpractice insurance,
ObamaCare,
wrongful birth and wrongful life
A new book and a “60 Minutes” report have brought back into the news the case of the killer nurse who murdered at least dozens of patients in New Jersey and Pennsylvania with drug overdoses and may have killed many more. There’s plenty of blame to go around among hospitals and others, but readers of this site will recall reason Cullen’s career went on so long: “When hospitals checked Cullen’s resume and previous jobs, they were given positive or neutral reports by his former employers, who feared getting sued if they provided a negative one.” [Asbury Park Press] Earlier here, here, etc.
Tagged as:
hospitals,
workplace
Compounding pharmacies, which mix medications to order, are a corner of the drug business that has been much less heavily regulated than mass-manufacturing drug companies. As a result, the compounders began expanding their market presence as against the mass manufacturers, and even get into mass manufacturing methods themselves. The process accelerated in the past few years after tightened FDA control of conventional makers’ production practices (under GMP, or Good Manufacturing Practice, regulation) began to result in widespread production-line suspensions; for hospitals and other users, the availability of compounded alternatives is often the only fallback in the face of shortages.
Unfortunately, poor quality control at some compounders resulted in a series of fiascos culminating in a meningitis outbreak. Now the Washington Post reports that major drug companies are seizing the chance to hobble their competition by pressing for maximally burdensome regulation of compounders, including the addition of regulations unrelated to safety, such as rules aimed at restricting the compounding of formulas that imitate the action of patented products. Hospitals, which sometimes engage in compounding themselves to obtain medication for their patients, say overregulation could worsen the problem of drug shortages. [Kimberly Kindy and Lena Sun, Washington Post] Earlier on drug shortages here, here, etc.
Tagged as:
competition through regulation,
hospitals,
lobbyists,
pharmaceuticals
- “On Average, Physicians Spend Nearly 11 Percent Of Their 40-Year Careers With An Open, Unresolved Malpractice Claim” [Health Affairs via Pauline Chen, NY Times]
- SCOTUS lets stand Feds’ “accept Medicare or lose your Social Security” edict [Ilya Shapiro, Cato]
- Robot surgery: from the Google ads, you might think lawyers are circling [Climateer via Tyler Cowen]
- New York mandates more aggressive anti-sepsis measures in hospitals, and White Coat thinks it won’t end well [EP Monthly]
- Shortages of generic FDA-regulated sterile injectables begin to take deadly toll [AP/Worcester Telegram, earlier]
- Continuing the discussion of electronic medical records from a few days back: as medico-legal documents, EMRs are under pressure to be something other than candid and spontaneous [Kaus] While other patients wait for critical care, ER docs and nurses enter mandatory data fields for whether the infant is a smoker or the flu victim is a fall risk [White Coat]
- Obamacare part-time-work fiasco “only starting to become news when it hits university professors” [Coyote, David Henderson, earlier]
Tagged as:
emergency medicine,
hospitals,
medical malpractice,
Medicare,
ObamaCare,
pharmaceuticals
“So we now have a politician directly dictating medical policy to doctors at city hospitals.” [Radley Balko]
P.S. In the mayor’s view, just as you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, so you can’t fight painkiller abuse without overriding doctors’ judgment: “so you didn’t get enough painkillers and you did have to suffer a little bit…. there’s nothing perfect.” [Colin Campbell, Politicker]
Tagged as:
hospitals,
Michael Bloomberg,
pharmaceuticals
“In the topsy-turvy world of health care, doctors and hospitals have a very powerful influence on how you are treated,” he [a university investigator] said. [San Jose Mercury-News] Topsy-turvy indeed — who would have guessed such a thing? (& InsureBlog)
Tagged as:
hospitals,
medical
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination by recipients of federal education spending and other programs, does not currently allow private litigants to sue demanding punitive (as distinct from compensatory) damages, nor do the courts entertain private suits complaining of “disparate impact” under it. Some trial lawyers and advocates of expansive discrimination law have long wanted to change that, and now Hans Bader of the Competitive Enterprise Institute is warning that there are efforts afoot to slip an expansion into law by attaching it to some “must-pass” piece of legislation. An effort by Democratic senators to attach it to the Defense Authorization Act appears to have fallen short, but it may be back as a rider on other bills, with serious courtroom consequences, Bader warns, for schools and colleges and also for doctors and hospitals.
Tagged as:
disability & schools,
discrimination law,
disparate impact,
hospitals,
punitive damages,
schools
- Community college restructures staff to avoid ObamaCare employee mandate [Daniel Luzer, Washington Monthly] New pressure toward part-time employment is a big story [Coyote] But do regulations allow shift to part-time workers as a way of evading 50-employee rule, as seemingly contemplated in above post? [Gunn Chamberlain, P.A.] Why some workers might prefer being dropped from their employer’s health plan if higher pay results [Thom Lambert]
- Eleventh Circuit: hospital can be sued for not providing sign-language interpreter for emergency department visitors [Disabilities Law/Bagenstos]
- Proposition: “Off-label use can be, in many circumstances, the standard of care.” [Drug and Device Law] On Ben Goldacre’s new book “Bad Pharma” [Tyler Cowen]
- Overnight solution to med-mal crisis? Perhaps standard for lawyers’ malpractice should automatically fluctuate to reflect that for doctors [Ted Frank, Point of Law]
- Criminalizing the professions [White Coat]
- Drug shortages persist [ACSH, earlier here, here, etc.] What the FDA could do to speed antibiotic approval [Yevgeniy Feyman, Medical Progress Today, earlier]
- Clearer line-drawing between pharmacy and mass drug-compounding needed after tainted-steroid debacle [Scott Gottlieb/Sheldon Bradshaw, WSJ, earlier] With compounding pharmacy doubtfully able to pay claims, “You’re going to get people suing everyone.” [Boston Globe, David Oliver]
Tagged as:
FDA,
hospitals,
legal malpractice,
medical malpractice,
ObamaCare,
pharmaceuticals
“Delano Regional Medical Center in Kern County defended its English-only policy as necessary for patient care.” Nonetheless, without admitting wrongdoing, it yielded to a complaint from the U.S. Department of Justice and the Asian Pacific American Legal Center that it had improperly penalized Filipino-American workers for communicating with each other in their own language. The suit had alleged, among other things, that the hospital had been more liberal in permitting the use of other languages other than English, and that it had not prevented workers from making fun of accents and expressing ethnically-based hostility. [L.A. Times, ABA Journal]
Tagged as:
California,
Department of Justice,
hospitals,
language bias
- Submit to individual mandate, or pay a tax to get out: hey, there’s a precedent for that [Akhil Amar via Magliocca]
- Stare decisis be damned? Missouri high court overturns own precedent to strike down damage caps [Post-Dispatch, PoL, MissouriNet, American Medical News (AMA)]
- Authorities say Florida hospital employee may have wrongfully accessed more than 700,000 patient records; crash victims got lawyer-chiropractor solicitations from someone familiar with nonpublic details of their cases [Jeff Weiner, Orlando Sentinel]
- Time to rethink Certificate of Need supply restrictions [Barton Hinkle, Richmond Times-Dispatch]
- By its legislative author: “What New Hampshire’s ‘early offer’ law really does” [J. Brandon Giuda, Union Leader, earlier]
- Dueling studies on impact of Texas medical liability reform [David Hyman, Charles Silver et al, "Does Tort Reform Affect Physician Supply?", Stephen Magee, "Contrary Evidence" (PDF) and "Rapid Physician Supply Response"; ACEP; Austin American-Statesman on Hyman/Silver, D Magazine and Longview News-Journal on Magee, Gov. Rick Perry] “Liability insurers are noticing an uptick in large verdicts” [Alicia Gallegos, American Medical News (AMA)]
- “Medicare Costs Too Much, So Let’s Make Private Payers Make Up the Difference” [Peter Suderman, Reason; John Walters, Maryland Public Policy Institute]
Tagged as:
Florida,
hospitals,
medical malpractice,
Medicare,
Missouri,
Texas
- “Wisconsin Judge To Voters: Drop Dead” [Matt Patterson, CEI; Adam Freedman, PoL; J.D. Tuccille, Reason]
- “How much of Occupy rally shrinkage is due to unions moving on and focusing their energy elsewhere?” [@daveweigel]
- Should babysitters be legally entitled to work rules and meal breaks? California Senate approves “Domestic Workers Bill of Rights” pushed by celebs, AFL-CIO [Politico, earlier]
- Good luck in getting that “don’t disparage or defame” employment policy past the NLRB [Molly DiBianca, Delaware Employment Law Blog]
- “Hospital unionization harms the sick” [David Bier and Iain Murray, Capital Research Center]
- Penn, Columbia: we’ll use this big cash pot to discriminate in faculty hiring [Minding the Campus: KC Johnson, John Rosenberg, Roger Clegg]
- More on NLRB’s new curbs on confidentiality in internal employee investigations [WSJ Law Blog, earlier]
Tagged as:
California,
colleges and universities,
hospitals,
labor unions,
Wisconsin
Thousands die while waiting for kidneys, while thousands of sound donated kidneys are thrown out. Among culprits, per the New York Times: “an outdated computer matching program, stifling government oversight, the overreliance by doctors on inconclusive tests and even federal laws against age discrimination.” One federal initiative, for example, penalizes institutions whose transplant success rate is less than stellar. What could go wrong?
…dozens of transplant specialists said the threat of government penalties had made doctors far more selective about the organs and patients they accepted, leading to more discards … [Toledo transplant surgeon Michael] Rees still bristles at the trade-off. “Which serves America better?” he asked. “A program doing 100 kidneys and 88 percent of them are working, or a program that does 60 kidneys and 59 of them are working? It’s rationing health care under the guise of quality, and it’s a tragedy that we are throwing away perfectly good organs.”
Meanwhile, Europe has had success with the practice of matching donors with recipients within the same age bracket, but a similar proposal in the U.S. “died quickly after federal officials warned that discrimination laws would prohibit the use of age to determine outright who gets a transplant.”
Tagged as:
age discrimination,
hospitals
On July 12 New York Times columnist Jim Dwyer wrote an extensive story about the death of a 12-year-old boy who had been brought to an emergency room with fever and rapid pulse, sent home, and died of septic shock. Lab test results and other indicators of distress allegedly went unheeded, and the boy’s family is represented by Thomas Moore, perhaps the city’s premier medical malpractice lawyer. Some legal blogs had a field day citing Dwyer’s article as an example of flagrant medical malpractice, as they depicted it; other reactions, some gathered in a Dwyer follow-up column, were more mixed.
White Coat, the blog at Emergency Physicians Monthly, has been resistant to the Dwyer-Moore narrative of the case. Its blog posts can be found here,
here, here, and here.
Tagged as:
emergency medicine,
hospitals,
medical malpractice,
New York Times,
NYC
“Several hospitals in New York City are eliminating or trimming malpractice insurance, and at least two of them have no further reserves to pay claims. Some hospitals in other cities, particularly jurisdictions known for large malpractice awards, are also going uninsured, the New York Times reports.” [ABA Journal]
Tagged as:
hospitals,
medical malpractice insurance,
NYC
