Australia: 28-year-old James Samuel Steward, who “was serving a three-year sentence at Goulburn jail when he overdosed on illegally acquired methadone in May 1998”, is now “suing the state for more than $4 million. … His barrister, Barry Hall, QC, … argued that among the department’s breaches of duty of care was its failure to adequately manage the jail to prevent the entry of illegal drugs.” (Leonie Lamont, “Ex-prisoner sues over drug disablement”, Sydney Morning Herald, May 11). For a case in which a woman sued an American hospital for not preventing the smuggling of the illegal drugs on which she overdosed, see Jun. 27, 2003.
Posts Tagged ‘hospitals’
One less Illinois doctor
“Dr. Eileen Murphy has been delivering babies for 18 years, including Governor [Rod] Blagojevich’s daughter, Anne. But on April 30 she’ll see her last patient. She just can’t afford to do it anymore. … The problem’s not her $170,000 a year salary. It’s her insurance premium which jumped to $138,000 this year. Without insurance she can’t get hospital privileges. ‘If anything goes wrong, even if it’s a possible complication, a possible natural outcome, you can almost guarantee that you are going to be sued,’ Murphy said.” (“Doctors Protest Malpractice Rates”, CBS 2 Chicago, Mar. 24). Murphy plans to become a junior high school teacher instead, according to news reports. “I am going on strike for tort reform,” she wrote in a letter to her patients. More: Spoons Experience, Capitol Grilling bulletin board. Even more: Chicago Tribune on state’s crisis (“The doctors are leaving”, Apr. 18) (editorial); Maureen Martin, Heartland Institute, Mar. 26; Patrick J. Powers, “Doctor laments loss of friends to other states”, Belleville News-Democrat, Jan. 14.
The Hartford Courant on Apr. 4 (reg) ran a guest commentary by an attorney named Henry Kopel (“My Colleagues Are Wrecking Health Care”) who is married to an obstetrician/gynecologist and who begins his column: “I am an attorney, and I am ashamed of what my profession is doing to health care in America.” (reprinted: Connecticut College of Emergency Physicians). And here are a couple more medical-liability sites we haven’t previously noted: Doctors for Medical Liability Reform (various physician specialty groups), Protect Access to Care & Treatment (American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons).
“Blair ally attacks British ‘culture’ of compensation”
“Britain suffers from a ‘compensation culture’ that deprives schools and hospitals of nearly ?700 million a year that could be spent on extra teachers and nurses, a close ally of Tony Blair says today. Stephen Byers, the former Trade Secretary who advises the Prime Minister on policy, is calling for sweeping legal reforms to stop funds being diverted from public services to those who ‘blame, claim and gain’ if things go wrong.” In a speech in Birmingham, Mr. Byers called for a national debate on claim payouts that have reached ?200 million a year for schools and ?477 million for claims against the National Health Service, enough to hire 8,000 teachers and 22,700 nurses, and have encouraged excessive caution in service provision, as with teachers’ reluctance to lead field trips (see Mar. 2). Among possible remedies: no-fault compensation, use of alternate dispute resolution, curbs on “no fee, no win” legal practice, and tighter scrutiny of misleading advertisements by lawyers. (Toby Helm, Daily Telegraph, Mar. 10). For many related posts, see our UK category.
Update: “Diaz, Minor face additional counts”
Mississippi Supreme Court scandal, cont’d: “A federal grand jury added extortion and attempted bribery charges Friday against Justice Oliver Diaz Jr. and trial lawyer Paul Minor, postponing their March 1 trial. … The new charges allege Minor in 2001 tried to extort $20,000 for Diaz from trial lawyers representing Dawn Bradshaw, who was awarded $9 million after poor hospital care led to pneumonia and brain damage.
“The high court upheld the $9 million verdict Oct. 11, 2001. According to the indictment, 14 days later, Minor told two unnamed lawyers that Diaz ‘helped swing the vote … in favor of their client, Dawn Bradshaw, and that the vote could have gone either way but for … Diaz’s influence,’ pointing out the justice would soon be voting on the motion for rehearing their case. Minor asked the pair for at least $20,000, which would pay for a function at the bed and breakfast operated by Jennifer Diaz [ex-wife of the justice], the indictment says. The lawyers refused, the indictment says.” Minor called the new charges “false” while his attorney, Abbe Lowell of Washington, D.C., called them “outrageous” and said his client would plead not guilty to them. An attorney for Diaz said his client neither spoke to the lawyers from whom the indictment says he attempted to extort money nor “authorized anyone to speak to them on his behalf.” (Jerry Mitchell, Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Feb. 21). See Dec. 19, Aug. 19, Jul. 27 and links from there. Update Apr. 30, 2005: Diaz’s ex-wife reaches plea agreement with prosecutors.
Radio Shack receipt suit
A customer from the Long Island suburb Wyandanch had her address entered into a Radio Shack computer by a prankster under her town’s nickname “Crimedanch.” Tanisha Torres, who acknowledges that she’s heard other people use the nickname, was so “embarrassed, flustered and shamed” that, after having that address printed out on a Radio Shack receipt on several occasions, she ran to a lawyer, Andrew Siben, who has sued the retail chain. (Robin Topping, “No Writing Off This Receipt”, Newsday, Feb. 4) (via Obscure Store). We think Mr. Siben is suffering from a failure of imagination: if Radio Shack has such potency that it can force a customer to shop there again and again even as it was repeatedly causing her such emotional distress, then it must have a degree of market power that potentially violates the antitrust laws.
Siben was previously quoted by Newsday lamenting that a spate of good weather had reduced his office’s workload of slip-and-fall cases. (A.J. Carter, “A Weather-Related Slowdown”, Jul. 29, 2002). Siben made his first mark in this space for an $80,000 settlement in a $4 million suit against the Upper Room Tabernacle Church, explaining to the New York Post that the plaintiff “was caused to fall by the Holy Spirit but unfortunately there was no-one there to catch her when she fell.” (Feb. 11-12, 2002; “Worshipper’s Holy Spirit Fall Nets Her $80,000 From Church”, New York Post, Feb. 2, 2002). Siben also represented Edwin Devito in his $5 million suit against American Airlines; Devito claims he was “knocked to the floor” (but not hospitalized) and suffered nightmares when a jet engine from Flight 587 crashed near where he was working. (AP, Sep. 9, 2002).
HIPAA and the clergy
Among the many other effects of the new federal medical privacy law (see Oct. 23, Nov. 9, Jan. 21): clergy “now can look in on only those patients who have requested visits”. Result: if a longtime parishioner is admitted to the hospital unconscious, or just doesn’t realize that an affirmative request is required, the clergyman may be barred from entering the room to pray with or for them. “Before HIPAA, [Father Casey] Mahone said he could look at a list of Catholic patients and visit the ones he knew. ”People kind of had the mentality that they were going to be “discovered” by their priest in the hospital,’ he said. ‘If we didn’t find them, they were disappointed.'” “[Rev. Jack] Flint said he wanted to pray with a woman before she died from injuries suffered in an automobile accident. ”But because (the hospital) couldn’t release her name, I was lost,’ he lamented. ‘I didn’t get to do that.’ Instead of his calling her family to pray at her bedside, her family called him to pray at her funeral.” (“Health privacy law hinders clergy visits at hospital”, AP/Morgantown, W.V. Dominion Post, Feb. 3). More: GruntDoc, Feb. 5 (and see reader comments).
“Lawyers try new tacks in malpractice suits”
Trial lawyers are finding new ways to transfer money from the pockets of doctors to attorneys. An Ohio jury voted 6-2 that Cleveland doctor Franklin Price was liable for $3.5 million because he didn’t do enough to help Lawrence Smith lose weight and stop smoking, and thus avoid a fatal heart attack. (Tanya Albert, “Jury says doctor didn’t do enough to help obese smoker”, American Medical News, May 12, 2003). In Florida, Miriam Kamin is about to go to trial in a lawsuit against Baptist Hospital of Miami not because they misperformed her pancreatic surgery, but because she feels that the hospital should have referred her to a hospital that performs the operation more often. And in Ohio and Texas, plaintiffs are trying to avoid medical malpractice caps by restating the claims as “corporate negligence.” (Tanya Albert, American Medical News, Feb. 9).
Update: killer nurse lawsuits
Plenty of families have already sued or are planning to sue hospitals that employed alleged killer nurse Charles Cullen. However, a common thread in many suits “seems to be that the lawyers pursuing them have gathered little evidence that Cullen was responsible for patients who died or fell ill.” (“Killer Nurse Case Sparks Medical Lawsuits”, AP/FoxNews.com, Jan. 15). And columnist Paul Carpenter of the Allentown (Pa.) Morning Call finds an irony in the circumstance (see Dec. 18) that Cullen bounced from hospital to hospital while each new employer was kept in the dark about his past, fear of litigation having choked off frank reference-giving: “it was the legal establishment that prevented employers from learning about a prospective worker’s background, allowing Nurse Cullen to run amok, and now it is the legal establishment that is eagerly seeking to reap enormous profits by blaming the medical institutions that employed him.” (“Who, the man asks, created the problem?”, Dec. 23)
More medical privacy madness
More presumably unintended consequences (see Oct. 23, Nov. 9) of HIPAA, the new federal law menacing institutions with $10,000 fines for releasing too much information about patients:
* “When Arkansas announced three flu deaths among its 2.8 million residents on Dec. 5 … it wouldn’t say whether the victims were young [despite intense public interest in whether this year’s flu was killing otherwise healthy children]. After consultation with its lawyers, it added only that the deaths involved adults in any of a dozen or so high-risk groups. In Iowa, state doctors wouldn’t list the hometown of a 1-year-old who died of the flu and wouldn’t say how long the child was ill, when it died or whether it had had a flu shot. It also wouldn’t say whether the child was boy or a girl.” (“Ark. Limits Info Regarding Flu Deaths”, AP/ABCNews.com, Dec. 30).
* Volunteer groups bringing holiday toys, teddy bears, and brownies to Quad Cities hospital wards are sometimes being told to leave the items with hospital staffs rather than visit the wards, and Santa Claus can make an appearance only if a separate guardian’s consent is obtained for each hospitalized child, according to the Moline Dispatch (Kurt Allemeier and Tory Brecht, “Privacy concerns limit Santa?s hospital visits”, Dec. 25; also see Martha Irvine, “How gifts can overwhelm children’s hospitals”, AP/Boston Globe, Dec. 25).
* And after Joynal Abedin became a victim of a fatal hit-and-run in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Adelphi, Md., his family did not learn of his fate for two weeks until it received a $17,000 bill from Washington Hospital Center in the mail; the hospital’s fear of medical privacy breaches was one factor contributing to the delay. (Yolanda Woodlee, “Hospital Bill Is Family’s Only Clue”, Washington Post, Jan. 20)
Newsweek vs. ATLA: Stuart Taylor, Jr. responds (I)
Newsweek, as is typical for a newsweekly, published only a terse editorial response (see previous post) to the litigation lobby’s concerted attack on its reporting. However, Stuart Taylor, Jr., the distinguished veteran journalist who (with Evan Thomas) was principal author of the feature, has kindly consented to let us reprint his more detailed point-by-point rebuttal to ATLA’s official gripe catalogue, published under the title “Spin or Facts? A Look Behind Newsweek’s Series ‘Lawsuit Hell’“. Because of the length of Taylor’s response, we’ve split it into two posts, the first responding to the first six points of ATLA’s critique and the second responding to the rest. Check out in particular, under heading #6, ATLA’s false (and remarkably brazen) assertion that the Tillinghast study’s $233 billion estimate of the cost of the liability insurance sector includes “the cost of the entire property/casualty insurance industry” and in particular the cost of hurricanes and similar damage. (It doesn’t.)