Orlando Injury Lawyer Blog

Frustrated by delays in health care, injured Iraq war veterans accused VA Secretary in a lawsuit of breaking the law by denying them disability pay and mental health treatment. The lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, seeks broad changes in the agency as it struggles to meet growing demands from veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Suing on behalf of hundreds of thousands of veterans, it charges that the VA has failed warriors on numerous fronts. It contends the VA failed to provide prompt disability benefits, failed to add staff to reduce wait times for medical care and failed to boost services for post-traumatic stress disorder.

The lawsuit also accuses the VA of deliberately cheating some veterans by allegedly working with the Pentagon to misclassify PTSD claims as pre-existing personality disorders to avoid paying benefits. The VA and Pentagon have generally denied such charges.

The lawsuit comes amid intense political and public scrutiny of the VA and Pentagon following reports of shoddy outpatient care of injured soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and elsewhere. The complaint seeks to represent between 320,000 and 800,000 veterans of the Iraq war who lawyers say are at risk of having PTSD. Ultimately, a federal judge will have to decide whether the lawsuit is properly deemed a class action that adequately represents them.

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Over the past two decades representing injury victims, we have seen horrific examples of corporations putting profit over people. Recently, the American Association for Justice has reported on such corporate tactics and the fact that corporations will stop at nothing to protect their profits. A recent case in the Illinois courts helps to expose one such corporate tactic: manipulating expert witness testimony.

Expert witnesses are a critical resource in numerous cases. Courts require litigants to provide expert testimony in virtually every serious injury case. Negligent corporations, however, have begun using their financial clout in an attempt to buy experts — even academics. What's more, they have done so behind a veil of secrecy.

In Rago v. Federal Signal Corp., firefighters who had suffered noise-induced hearing loss from sirens produced by Federal Signal Corp. brought a mass tort lawsuit for restitution from the company in an Illinois state court. In the course of defending Federal Signal, the company's lawyers pointed to an academic study published by Dr. William Clark, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine. The study concluded that firefighters were not at risk of hearing loss from sirens, despite their exposure to high levels of occupational noise. What the lawyers, and the study itself, did not say was that Clark had long been a paid consultant to Federal Signal and had helped the company defend other hearing-loss litigation while he was conducting his research. In fact, the "study" was based on data Federal Signal itself had collected and provided to Clark.

Federal Signal did all it could to hide its role in the study, even when it was required under standard court procedures to disclose its involvement in research. When the firefighters' lawyers learned of the company's cover-up, they forced the company to turn over an additional 1,400 pages of data and analysis that it had previously held back. As a punishment for the deception, the judge, barred the company from using the study in court, barred Clark from testifying and ordered Federal Signal to pay the firefighters $50,000 in attorney fees for the additional time their lawyers had to spend to force the company to come clean.

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Posted In: Litigation Strategy

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With all the food poisoning and food safety issues of late, the Food and Drug Administration came under heavy criticism by a House panel for its handling of recent food-safety violations. In addition, the administration has disclosed plans to establish a working group to review the safety of food and other imports. Of course, this should have been done sooner.

With concern mounting because of recent incidents involving not only tainted food but also toothpaste, tires and other products from China, a White House official said the administration is forming a panel on import safety to be chaired by Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt that will include other Cabinet officers.

The FDA inspects less than 1 percent of the imported food it is responsible for monitoring -- including seafood, fruits and vegetables -- and only a small fraction of those inspections include taking samples of products for testing, subcommittee investigators found. In San Francisco, FDA employees who review hundreds of shipments a day have an average of 30 seconds to decide whether each needs further investigation, according to subcommittee investigators.

Last month, the FDA began requiring Chinese importers of five types of seafood, including catfish, to show that their products had been tested for banned antibiotics. According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, about 13 percent of the average American's diet is imported food, and imports of FDA-regulated food have more than doubled since 2000, to 9 million shipments in 2006. That includes a 350 percent increase in the value of U.S. imports of Chinese agricultural and seafood products, from $880 million in 1996 to $4 billion in 2006.

Hopefully, significant changes will result and food safety will receive the attention it deserves. Too many innocent people suffer when the government fails to maintain appropriate over-sight of our food supply. Unfortunately, there have been too many incidents to trust food safety to the food suppliers and the food industry.

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Posted In: Food Contamination & Food Poisoning

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Following recent drug-safety scandals, including the 2004 Vioxx withdrawal, the U.S. House of Representatives has voted in favor of giving health officials more resources to do their job. The Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) gives the U.S. Food and Drug Administration an additional $400 million in fees collected from the drug industry. The money is earmarked for drug safety oversight over the next five years, including increased "postmarketing" surveillance of drugs already on the market.

The Senate has already passed a similar bill. Both bills mandate the continuance, through 2012, of a program whereby drug companies pay fees to the FDA to offset agency expenditures on the review of new medicines. House and Senate committees must now work on a compromise bill acceptable to both bodies.

The bill, passed Wednesday in the House with a 403-16 vote, gives the FDA authority to require post-marketing safety studies, and it requires drug companies to provide timetables for completing these studies. The agency also reserves the right to mandate label changes to a drug or restrict its use or distribution, should problems arise. In addition, the bill reauthorizes a medical device industry user-fee program. That is expected to add extra cash to FDA coffers.

One item noticeably absent from the House bill: any provision that would allow U.S. consumers to buy cheaper drugs from abroad. The White House has said in the past that it would veto any bill containing such a clause.

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Posted In: Consumer Products

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Medical malpractice may well be the fifth-leading cause of death in the United States according to the Millennium Research Group (MRG). This global authority on medical technology market intelligence has conducted a detailed and thorough analysis of the acute care clinical information systems (CIS) market and finds that a major driver in the US is the demand for improvement in patient safety.

Medical errors are the fifth-leading cause of deaths in the US, with up to 98,000 deaths annually. According to the new report entitled US Markets for Acute Care Clinical Information Systems, hospitals are adopting CIS to help them provide adequate, timely care and reduce the frequency of preventable errors.

Medical errors in the healthcare system arise from miscommunication, physician order transcription errors, adverse drug events, or incomplete patient medical records. Generally, medical errors are caused by overcrowded, understaffed clinical areas with complex workflow patterns, and incomplete or inefficient communication between clinical areas. Through the use of a CIS, professionals within each clinical area are able to access and use information pertinent to a patient's medical profile and history. As a result, CIS can effectively help prevent errors and enhance patient safety.

The CIS market -- comprised of radiology information systems, pharmacy and medication management information systems, cardiovascular and cardiology information systems, laboratory information systems, emergency department information systems, and critical care information systems -- was valued at over $900 million in 2005. By 2010, revenues in the CIS market will exceed $1.5 billion.

A CIS is a computer-based inpatient information system designed for collecting, storing, manipulating, and making available clinical information that is important to the health care delivery process. It provides access to a patient's electronic medical record-clinical data storage technology that encodes the patient's previous medical history, responses to medication, test results, and current treatment. Certainly, every reasonable technological advance which increases patient safety should be considered. Too many medical malpractice cases result from errors that were easily avoidable.

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Posted In: Medical Malpractice

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Despite all the lawyer jokes, injury lawyers and those members of the bar who hold insurance companies accountable once again stepped in to protect consumers. It seems that for a year, a Florida state agency has thrown away records relating to consumer disputes with insurance companies. Of course, by destroying the material, the state makes it harder to track bad business practices by the insurance industry and uncover patterns of abuse. Such a practice is horrendous.

The documents are extra, unsolicited attachments to state forms called civil remedy notices that state administrators say they don't have the room or manpower to deal with. Florida law requires consumers to file the notices before they sue their insurers, giving companies 60 days to settle before the cases proceed to court.

The Department of Financial Services gets around 10,000 of these notices a year. It took the position that Florida's broad public records laws did not apply to the large volumes of information lawyers sent to be added to the notices file. Consequently, clerks were instructed to destroy the documents, which consisted of detailed explanations of the disputes, court pleadings and insurance company responses.

Instead of cracking down on bad insurers, by keeping this valuable information accessible to consumers and their lawyers, the agency was essentially covering up insurer misconduct. For now this practice has been put on hold. Tracking industry practices is exactly what Alex Sink vowed she would do when she took over as CFO earlier this year. We will have to keep an eye on this situation.

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As Orlando injury lawyers, we have educated many about the tactics of insurance companies following an injury or car accident. We have explained that if you have a personal injury claim it is a mistake to think that the insurance company responsible for paying the claim will treat you fairly. The objective of the insurance company is to make a profit. Profit is made by collecting premiums and paying out as little as the company can get away with in claims.

Michael Moore's controversial, new movie "Sicko" has some helpful examples of what we have been sharing with our clients and consumers generally. In his film, a former insurance company (HMO) executive testifies before congress. While she is testifying about denying health insurance claims the same holds true about how insurance companies treat personal injury liability claims.

Her testimony included:
"In all my work, I had one primary duty and that was to use my medical expertise for the financial benefit of the organization for which I worked and according to the managed care industry... [In the managed care industry] it is not an ethical issue to sacrifice a human being for a savings, no matter how that savings occurs. And I was repeatedly told that I was not denying care. I was simply denying payment."

Most injury victims that we represent have never made a claim before and simply wish to be treated fairly. Unfortunately, that “innocence” puts most injury victims at risk for being taken advantage of by insurance company representatives. If you have a serious personal injury claim it is a mistake to think the insurance company will treat you fairly. You must protect yourself and find an experienced personal injury attorney with the reputation and track record for going to court. That leverage will create an opportunity to better obtain a fair settlement.

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