New York Medical Malpractice

Advocates suggest a move to more comprehensive insurance coverage, including errors and omissions coverage, which is similar to medical malpractice insurance. Joyce M. Rosenberg of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette points out:

Mr. Drum is an advocate of companies buying as much insurance as they can, although he acknowledges that many owners don’t want to pay another expense.

“Insurance is part of a small-business person’s life, one of those burdens you have to bear for lots of reasons,” he said.

The article continues:

Mr. Drum said he regretted not buying what’s called employment practices liability insurance — coverage for such worker-related issues as sexual harassment, discrimination, wrongful discipline or termination, and failure to employ or promote. When an employee filed suit against his company, Mr. Drum said the business had to pay legal costs that otherwise would have been covered under an insurance policy.

Another type of insurance many owners should consider is errors and omissions coverage, which is akin to the malpractice insurance that medical and legal professionals carry. It can cover legal costs and damages when a client claims that a service failed to have the expected results, or when a service wasn’t performed at all.

If you’re a small business owner, I encourage you to research your insurance options and seriously consider some strategic additions to your small business insurance coverage.

Gardiner Harris in the New York Times specifically reports:

Drug and medical device companies should be banned from offering free food, gifts, travel and ghost-writing services to doctors, staff members and students in all 129 of the nation’s medical colleges, an influential college association has concluded.

The case against these corrupting practices is convincing:

Drug companies spend billions wooing doctors — more than they spend on research or consumer advertising. Medical schools, packed with prominent professors and impressionable trainees, are particularly attractive marketing targets.

So companies have for decades provided faculty and students free food and gifts, offered lucrative consulting arrangements to top-notch teachers and even ghost-wrote research papers for busy professors.

“Such forms of industry involvement tend to establish reciprocal relationships that can inject bias, distort decision-making and create the perception among colleagues, students, trainees and the public that practitioners are being ‘bought’ or ‘bribed’ by industry,” the report said.

The drug companies like, Merck “Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Amgen and Medtronic” have empty claims to the contrary:

They were wrong.

In addition to the gift, food and travel bans, the report recommended that medical schools should “strongly discourage participation by their faculty in industry-sponsored speakers’ bureaus,” in which doctors are paid to promote drug and device benefits.

More ethical guidelines and transparency in this area which is in great need of reform. I firmly believe that more open discussion about such issues would help improve the medical community and our national welfare.

Having a legal advisor to help you through the complex legal maze can be an important for legal and economic reasons.. Find Law asks:

How a Medical Malpractice Attorney Can Help

After any situation that could potentially involve medical malpractice, you should speak with an experienced Medical Malpractice attorney who will evaluate your case with you, to ensure that your legal rights are fully assessed and protected. An attorney can explain what you can expect at every step of your personal injury case, and will take action on your behalf — researching the law, interviewing witnesses, collecting records, conferring with expert consultants, planning legal strategy, and negotiating with insurers and opposing counsel — all with an eye toward strengthening your position and ensuring your fair recovery.

In a case of legal malpractice in a medical malpractice case, John Marzulli of the New York Daily News reports that:

A Great Neck lawyer is being sued for failing to file court papers in time to sue a urologist who allegedly botched a penile implant procedure.

The suit, filed in Brooklyn Federal Court, accuses Ira Podlofsky, of the law firm Podlofsky, Hill, Orange & Modzelewski, of missing the deadline to file a medical malpractice action against the doctor.

Podlofsky and his firm “failed to commence a lawsuit and negligently allowed the statute of limitations to expire,” according to the complaint filed by Christopher Isabella, who is back to being impotent - and powerlessto recover damages from the doctor.

Isabella, a carpenter formerly of Maspeth, Queens, claims he suffered serious injuries in 2004 when the doctor who installed the penile prosthesis failed to remove a foreign device during the surgery.

“It was a bonehead mistake,” Isabella’s new lawyer Peter Gordon said about the doctor’s flub.

The lesson learned: when you hire a medical malpractice lawyer, hire a responsible lawyer.

This incident of medical malpractice as reported in the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe is quite egregious:

LOS ANGELES - Minutes after routine surgery for acute appendicitis in October 2003, Staff Sergeant Dean Witt, 25, was being moved to a recovery room at a northern California military hospital when he gasped and stopped breathing.

A student nurse assisting an understaffed anesthesia team tried to resuscitate Witt and failed. Inexplicably, Witt’s gurney was wheeled into a pediatric area. Lifesaving devices sized for children, not a 175-pound adult, proved useless, according to an internal report on the case.

Medical personnel at David Grant Medical Center at Travis Air Force Base screamed at one another. A double dose of a powerful stimulant was mistakenly administered. When a breathing tube was finally inserted, it was misdirected. By the time a breathing tube finally was inserted correctly, Witt had devastating brain damage. Three months later, he was removed from life support and died. Witt, who grew up in Oroville, Calif., left behind a wife and two children, including a 4-month-old son.

The Boston Globe describes the legal landscape:

Despite the report’s harsh criticism of Witt’s medical care, the bereaved family could not sue for malpractice, because Witt was an active-duty airman. Under limits stemming from an obscure Supreme Court ruling nearly 60 years old, military hospitals and their staffs are immune from malpractice claims - even for the most egregious lapses - if the victim is an enlisted man or woman on active duty.

A series of court rulings since 1950 have upheld the original decision, known as Feres v. United States, which denies members of the military the right to sue for damages over medical errors or even deliberate wrongs.

Feres defenders say the doctrine is necessary to protect the military from costly, time-consuming trials that could compromise military discipline.

The LA Times suggest the Feres doctrine is both antiquated and misquided:

The Supreme Court came within a single vote of overturning Feres in 1987. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the dissenting opinion for the four-member minority: “Feres was wrongly decided and heartily deserves the ‘widespread, almost universal criticism’ it has received.”

Among the curious aspects of Feres is that it bars malpractice suits by active-duty military personnel but not by their spouses or other family members, who also are entitled to treatment at military hospitals.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Washington-based lawyer Eugene Fidell. “If a doctor malpractices on a dependent on one day, the family can sue. But if he commits the same malpractice the next day on a GI, they can’t.”

Here’s an interesting story from Maine–it seems that a neurosurgeon with a serious malpractice claim pending in New York applied for and was given privileges to practice in Maine. The Injury Board reports:

The neurosurgeon was then found liable in a medical malpractice suit for a surgical procedure which left a man in a wheelchair prior to the doctor coming to Maine.

Dr. Victor Ho has agreed to a payment of $1.9 million under a settlement and has no plans of appealing the New York jury’s verdict. Ho was a doctor at the New York Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn, New York in 2000 when the botched spinal surgery took place. In 2005 he came to Maine while on probation in New York.

One key risk area for medical malpractice is breast cancer.American Cancer Society suggests specific warning signs:

The most common sign of breast cancer is a new lump or mass. A painless, hard mass that has irregular edges is more likely to be cancerous, but some cancers are tender, soft, and rounded. For this reason, it is important that any new breast mass or lump be checked by a health care professional experienced in diagnosing breast diseases.

Other possible signs of breast cancer include:

* swelling of all or part of a breast (even if no distinct lump is felt)
* skin irritation or dimpling
* breast or nipple pain
* nipple retraction (turning inward)
* redness, scaliness, or thickening of the nipple or breast skin
* a discharge other than breast milk

Sometimes a breast cancer can spread to underarm lymph nodes and cause a lump or swelling there, even before the original tumor in the breast tissue is large enough to be felt.

In corporate legal news according to Corporate Legal Times:

April 16, 2008
A New York judge has allowed a legal malpractice suit alleging faulty due diligence work by Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker to proceed. Investor Ronald Katz hired the law firm to represent him in connection with a $3 million investment in a company called Humitech. Katz claims the lawyers failed to determine that Humitech was not the beneficial owner of certain mineral rights he expected to obtain, and that other collateral in the form of stocks was encumbered.

According to Bloomberg and the Journal of the American Medical Association:

April 16 (Bloomberg) — Merck & Co. conducted its own studies on the pain pill Vioxx, then hired companies to ghostwrite reports for medical journals that appeared under the names of scientists who didn’t do the majority of the research, court records show.

In many cases, Merck’s involvement in producing the data wasn’t disclosed, according to two articles in the current Journal of the American Medical Association relying on court papers. The documents disclosed by Merck in two Vioxx lawsuits also suggest the company’s control of the data allowed it to downplay the risk of death from Vioxx in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, the journal’s editors said in an editorial.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are harmed every year by medication errors made at the hospital, but it’s not just adults who face the brunt of the problem. A new study finds the issue is widespread among children.

The number is alarming: one out of every 15 children is the victim of a medication mix-up at the hospital, according to a new study in the journal “Pediatrics.”

“This is the first publication that indicated that it’s that level of harm,”

Dr. Charles Homer

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