When Companies Put Profits Ahead Of Consumer Safety...

Even though pharmaceutical and medical product manufacturers must follow strict Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations to ensure public health and safety, the well-being of consumers is not always at the forefront of profiting companies. In an attempt to increase profits, these companies conduct only the minimal safety tests, or they rush through production resulting in potentially dangerous side effects never being revealed. When any person or business puts making money before the health and safety of their consumer, they must be held liable for their negligence.

Many well known drugs on the market have been recalled due to dangerous side effects that were unknown to the FDA at the time they were approved. Regrettably, the FDA's post-market trials often come too late. This results in tens of thousands of people suffering life altering injuries, and sometimes death from dangerous or unlabeled side effects, false advertising or misrepresentation, or drug contamination. For that reason, class actions lawsuits against the manufacturers of Avandia, Chantix, Effexor, Paxil, Vioxx, and Yasmin are currently pending.

Each year, millions of people rely on a variety of medical devices to improve the quality of their lives, trusting that these devices are safe and beneficial. Yet many are faced with defective medical devices that often result in debilitating injuries, pain and suffering, and death.

The FDA has recalled over 100,000 Johnson & Johnson, Zimmer, and DePuy artificial hip and knee implants. These implants have been known to loosen, detach, dislocate, and cause infection from metal residue. Additional surgical procedures are required to correct the damage done by defective products. There is a class action lawsuit in place to secure compensation for those who require it.

Other medical devices recalled by the FDA include Medtronic infusion pumps, Boston Scientific coronary stents and catheters, and Synthes USA vertebral body implants.

Educate yourself on medical implants and prescription drugs. Speak to your doctor about the risks and the potential side effects involved. Find out if you risk further health complications by using a certain product. Research the manufacturer's safety record, its success rate, and the amount of time it has been on the market. Also be sure to ask your doctor whether or not they receive compensation from the manufacturer for prescribing the device or drug.

The consequences of pharmaceutical and medical product negligence can result in catastrophic injuries, emotional and financial hardships for the victim and their family, and death. If you have sustained injury, or if a loved one was killed, as the result of negligence by a pharmaceutical or medical product company, you and your family may qualify for compensation. Contact the Defective Product Attorneys of The Glassman Law Firm at 314-446-6000 to discuss your legal rights and options.

GlaxoSmithKline Involved In Largest Health Care Fraud Settlement In US History

In the largest health care fraud settlement in United States history, GlaxoSmithKline is set to plead guilty to promoting drugs for unapproved uses. GSK must pay $3 billion dollars in fines, $1 billion will go towards criminal wrong doing while the remaining $2 billion is set aside for a victims fund.

In an attempt to maximize profits, GSK unlawfully promoted drugs that were not approved by the FDA for alternative uses, hid dangerous results from the government and consumers, and bribed physicians into using these drugs whenever possible even when not medically necessary.

Among some of the drugs that were improperly marketed are the widely used antidepressants Paxil and Wellbutrin. Wellbutrin was marketed by GlaxoSmithKline from 1999- 2003 for alternative uses such as sexual dysfunction, substance addiction, ADHD and weight loss -- treatment for which the FDA had not been approved Wellbutrin. The adult approved antidepressant. Similarly, Paxil, an adult-approved antidepressant, was marketed by GSK from 1998-2003, representing its safe use by children and adolescents, though the FDA never approved it. GlaxoSmithKline also failed to report safety problems with its popular diabetes drug, Avandia, to the government from 2001 to 2007. Avandia has been banned in Europe and restricted in the U.S. after it was found to greatly increase the risk of heart attack and congestive heart failure. Advair was promoted by GSK as therapy for mild asthma with misleading claims. The anti-epileptic medication Lamictal was marketed for off-label psychiatric uses and pain management. Certain forms of Zofran were promoted to treat “morning sickness” in pregnant women even though it was only approved for post operative nausea.

"GSK's sales force bribed physicians to prescribe GSK products using every imaginable form of high priced entertainment, from Hawaiian vacations to paying doctors millions of dollars to go on speaking tours, to a European pheasant hunt, to tickets to Madonna concerts, and this is just to name a few," said Carmin M. Ortiz, U.S. attorney in Massachusetts.

Contact The Glassman Law Firm if you have suffered the effects of any of these drugs. The Glassman Law Firm has experience and success in obtaining substantial settlements when dealing with a large drug company’s settlement fund. As in the instance of the Dalkon Shield. The Dalkon Shield IUD, which was marketed by the A.H. Robins Company, was found to cause severe injury to a large percentage of its users. This subsequently lead to lawsuits in which juries awarded millions of dollars in compensation. Approximately 2.8 million women used this IUD as a result of the aggressive marketing of the Dalkon Shield despite the manufacturer’s awareness of safety issues. Through the representation of The Glassman Law Firm, you will be contributing the safety of your community by not allowing drug companies to misrepresent products that cause injuries to those relying on them to improve heath.

If you or a loved one has suffered loss of employment, serious injury, or death as a result of taking GlaxoSmithKline medications listed below, contact the The Glassman Law Firm.

• Advair 
• Avandia 
• Flovent 
• Imitrex 
• Lamictal 
• Lotronex 
• Paxil 
• Valtrex 
• Wellbutrin 
• Zofran

Malpractice Premiums Increase While Patient Safety Is On The Decline

In society, we tend to collectively attach ourselves to something that sounds right, rather than taking the time to carefully consider all of the facts. One such instance is in the case of medical malpractice. Ask anyone and they will tell you (based upon millions spent on ads run by insurance companies and the chambers of commerce), “Premiums are outrageous as a result of people suing the doctors and bilking the system.” Sounds true? Wrong.

Since 2003, payouts to patients nationally have steadily declined to the tune of 51%. Still however, people are calling for “more reform” when the current reform has worked... for doctors.

By placing a cap on how much compensation a patient can receive, state legislatures have created a disincentive for hospitals and doctors to practice safer medicine. Regardless of how negligent a medical provider is, by limiting damages recoverable by the victims of medical negligence, the medical profession essentially feels that, “No matter how negligent we are, we will only pay for a fraction of our error.” Consequently, medical error rates remain dangerously high.

"Mistakes are happening every day in every hospital in the country that we're just not catching," says Dr. Albert Wu, an internist at Johns Hopkins Hospital. More than 250,000 people every year die as a result of medical errors, and medical error injuries are in the millions. These combined numbers result in medical malpractice being “the third leading cause of death" in the country, according to Dr. Peter Pronovost, an anesthesiologist and critical care physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

If we decided to adopt the same philosophy regarding auto insurance, we could rear-end a Rolls Royce and pay no more than if we hit a Dodge Neon. Unfortunately, that absurdity is commonplace in the medical field. They are saying the same thing, “Whether we give you a scar or we permanently disable you, even kill you or a loved one, we’re only offering a one-size fits-all package.”

Still think more reform is needed? The statistics show that while medical malpractice premiums in Missouri have increased from $108 million to $176 million over the past 20 years (an average of only 3.15% annually), the number of patient injury and death payouts have fallen dramatically from 16,000 to 8,450, a 47% reduction. From 1991-2011 the cost of annual claim payments, including legal defense fees, fell from $76 million to $61 million; 60% of claims paid were less than $250,000 and 80% were under $500,000. Yet premiums continue to rise as the insurance companies air misleading ads claiming that “excessive” jury awards compel them to raise prices.

Since 1991 the number of insurers selling malpractice insurance in Missouri has grown from 72 to 93, an increase that wouldn’t happen were the business of malpractice were unprofitable. This business is so profitable in fact, a new report reveals that the average profit margin for the top 10 medical malpractice insurers is twice as high as 50 of the most profitable Fortune 500 companies. A report done by the American Association for Justice found that by distorting profits and losses, insurers have created bogus malpractice insurance “emergencies” so that lawmakers would consider limiting the legal rights of injured patients.

The president of the American Association for Justice said, “While health care costs skyrocket, Congress should not give another handout to malpractice insurers that have average profits higher than 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies. Congress needs to focus on patient safety, not efforts that will pad the pockets of insurance companies at the expense of Americans’ legal rights.”

Disclosure, Apology and Offer

A coalition of six healthcare organizations announced on Wednesday, the 18th of April, that the new “Disclosure, Apology and Offer” process will be piloted this year in seven various Massachusetts hospitals. This process requires disclosure to patients when a medical error is made and something goes wrong over the course of the patient's care. The error is then investigated, an apology is made, and financial compensation is offered in lieu of legal action.

“This idea that you have to wait for five years (for a suit) to play itself out in the legal system before you can get an explanation that you need to heal, I think it’s unacceptable,” says Dr. Ashley Yeats, chief medical officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital-Milton. “ It takes precious time away from patients, it takes time away from physicians, and it ultimately takes good people, I think, out of the health care system.”

While more transparency among health care providers is a good thing, it is cause for concern when the entire process can be controlled by the hospital itself. If it is decided that malpractice has occurred, the hospital then apologizes and makes an offer to the patient. In accepting that offer, the patient has just signed away all of his legal rights -- even if the patient requires future medical treatment that the settlement did not cover.

The hospitals say that patients will be “encouraged” to hire an attorney to evaluate whether an offer is fair, however counsel is not required. And since the overall goal of the program is to prevent any litigation, a representative from the hospital would most likely offer a settlement designed to minimize what a patient could likely recover if he was represented by an experienced malpractice lawyer. How could the average person decide if the offer is reasonable without the assistance of his own experienced counsel?

Suffolk University Law professor Gabriel H. Teninbaum reviewed apology programs across the country and writes this about the University of Michigan hospital system (UMHS) on which the Massachusetts apology program is based:

“Patients need an advocate because programs like UMHS have attorneys whose primary obligation is to protect the assets of their organization. Without legal advice of their own, patients who take part in apology programs must trust that risk managers would violate their obligation to their own employer (of keeping overall costs low), in order to give them an appropriate settlement. There is simply no evidence that this has, or will, occur and no program has released any data to that effect…

In other words, it has not been made public whether patients with valid claims for malpractice are giving up some compensation to which they are entitled in exchange for the warm discussions UMHS provides. If the small glimpse provided by [one anecdotal] case is a representative of what UMHS does, then the organization derives significant financial benefits by paying less money to patients injured by medical errors.”

If an “apology” is accepted by the patient, an apology protection provision would be included that would prevent a litigant from using the apology against a hospital or doctor, as proof of negligence, if a lawsuit were filed. This fact alone, calls into question both the sincerity of the apology and the true reason it was made. Was it to save the defendant money or merely an effort to persuade a grieving plaintiff from pursuing fair compensation in the legal system?

People should also be aware that this “apology” program may be no more than a subterfuge. Medicare now refuses payment of medical bills that were caused by medical negligence. If the hospital can “slip in” an apology before Medicare reveals its negligence, how many lawsuits will it avoid by giving the appearance of acting like a good citizen?

Bottom line: Representation by your own lawyer is the only way you can be assured of fair compensation. Hospitals and physicians do not give you something they could not already be liable to pay.