Personal Injury and Social Security Disability Blog

Proposed Bill Aims to Close 'Revolving Door' Between Automakers and NHTSA

>For years there has been an unhealthy and, in my opinion, unethical "revolving door" between government agencies and the industries they supposedly regulate. The perception is that the regulators go easy on the industries, hoping to land fat contracts with the industries when the bureaucrats leave government service. It's a great temptation, and surely hard to resist.

Now a bill has been introduced by California Senator Barbara Boxer that would restrict the transition from National Highway Traffic Safety Administration employee to automaker employee. The bill would bar former NHTSA employees from taking certain jobs with the automakers for three years after leaving the agency. The prohibited jobs would be any that required written or oral communication with the NHTSA.

This bill was surely written based on the recent revelations that many former top-level NHTSA administrators were employed by Toyota, and were the ones who negotiated limitations on the scope of safety examinations by the NHTSA into Toyota's actions. This bill is a good first step on the path to locking that revolving door.

Friday Fun

I just love stop-motion videos, and this one is pretty clever.

 

Insurers Seek to Recover Payments in Toyota Crash Claims

Insurance companies are gearing up to recoup from Toyota money they paid for claims in crashes involving sudden acceleration, the subject of major safety recalls by the Japanese automaker. It could also mean money back for some drivers who paid deductibles, according to a report by the Associated Press. Here are excerpts from the article:

At least six major insurers, including State Farm Insurance Cos., Allstate Corp. and Geico, have begun examining past claims involving the recalled vehicles, which number about 6 million in the U.S. and 8 million around the world. Insurers can request that Toyota pay them for the claim if a vehicle defect is proven to be a key factor in a crash, a long-standing industry practice known as subrogation. Many insurers have begun notifying Toyota Motor Corp. that they will do just that.

The move could repay some Toyota owners their out-of-pocket costs due to crashes but probably wouldn't have much of an impact on the premiums drivers pay. And it would mostly involve crashes in which people weren't seriously injured, because those cases frequently find their way into lawsuits.

Insurance companies typically refund deductibles — the amount a policyholder must pay before the insurance takes over — to their customers when they are repaid in such cases, officials of several companies said this week. None would release any financial estimates or the number of potential crashes, but given the sheer size of the Toyota recalls the liability could be in the millions of dollars.

Experts say most insurers have agreements with automakers to negotiate a confidential settlement over defect-related claims — and automakers such as Toyota usually have insurance to cover most of the costs.

"It will be a whole bunch of small claims. What you have here are the fender benders," said Mark Bunim of the mediation firm Case Closure LLC in New York. "The major claims, where someone's a paraplegic, they will not be part of that group."

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has linked 52 deaths to claims of sudden acceleration in Toyotas, and more than 100 wrongful death and personal injury lawsuits have been filed against the automaker around the country. Those are being consolidated before a California federal judge for pretrial matters along with more than 130 lawsuits filed by Toyota owners claiming their cars have lost value since the recalls. An initial hearing is set for May 13.

Featured Link - Calendar-365.com

Calendar-365.com is a simple site that just has calendars. But the site makes it easy to move backward or forward to other years so you can check what day of the week a particular date fell on. Another handy feature is that you can click on a holiday in 2010 and see when that holiday will occur in future years. This is certainly helpful for a "floating" holiday such as Easter, but I love it because I can never do the math to figure out what day of the week Christmas or Halloween will be on next year.

F.D.A. Steps Up Oversight of Infusion Pumps

The New York Times reports the Food and Drug Administration plans to "tighten their oversight" of medical devices, including infusion pumps that automatically deliver drugs and food to hospital patients. Last week the FDA issued guidelines requiring manufacturers of the pumps to provide the agency with more test data than previously required for approval. One reason for this action is that the FDA has received reports over the past five years of 710 patient deaths, and some officials suspect the actual number may be far higher. In those five years there have been 79 recalls of infusion pumps — the highest number of recalls for any medical device.

The biggest makers of infusion pumps include Baxter Healthcare of Deerfield, Ill.; Hospira of Lake Forest, Ill.; and CareFusion of San Diego. Here are excerpts from the article:

Infusion pumps normally use software to automatically control both the rate and volume of a medication’s flow. To set a pump for an individual patient’s needs, a doctor, a nurse or other health care worker enters information by using the buttons on a pump’s keypad, which resembles that of a phone.

Pump manufacturers say that most problems occur when a nurse or health care worker enters the wrong data accidentally. F.D.A. officials said, however, that based on their review of pump complaints they thought many deaths and injuries related to the devices were less the result of user error than of product design and engineering.

For example, agency officials said that some pumps were prone to key bounce, a problem in which defective software interprets a single keystroke as two separate presses of that key. For example, instead of dispensing two units of a drug, a pump would dispense 22 units.

Despite Federal Law, Many Hospitals Aren't Reporting Disciplinary Actions

The consumer organization Public Citizen has issued a report stating that hospitals and medical boards, contrary to the federal law of the past 20 years, are not reporting all the doctors they discipline for medical incompetence, unprofessional conduct, substandard care, etc. These reports are supposed to be made to the National Practitioner Data Bank. Here are excerpts from a newspaper article about the Public Citizen report and about the law itself:

It was designed to protect the public from bad doctors, particularly those who move to another hospital or another state to try to hide their mistakes. The Data Bank allows hospitals and other medical organizations to see a doctor's disciplinary record before hiring him or her -- with a single, simple check instead of having to contact medical boards in every state. State medical boards, which license doctors, also use the Data Bank to launch investigations into unscrupulous physicians.

Congress had our backs when it passed the law 24 years ago. But many hospitals don't appear to be following the law, says the nonprofit consumer group Public Citizen. Researchers there found that 49 percent of hospitals in the United States hadn't reported a single doctor to the Data Bank from when it began, in 1990, until the end of 2007.

Here's a sampling of what Public Citizen found:

• Some hospitals decided to stop suspending their doctors altogether, so they don't have to report them to the Data Bank. Instead, they discipline doctors by giving them a leave of absence or making them take classes.

• Other hospitals skirt the law by suspending doctors for fewer than 30 days. The law says only doctors suspended for more than 30 days must be reported.

• At least one hospital, Redding Medical Center in Redding, Calif., didn't report doctors who'd performed hundreds of unnecessary valve and bypass surgeries -- uncovered in a federal investigation -- because of the "prestige" of one of the doctors involved and the amount of money those surgeries brought the hospital.

•Other groups say the number of doctors reported to the Data Bank should be much higher. They have good reason for believing that. According to one study by the Office of the Inspector General, for example, state medical boards took action against about 8,000 physicians over a three-year period. During that time, only 3,154 doctors were reported to the Data Bank.

Of course, there's much more information and detail in the report -- and in the law. But the bottom line is this: Many hospitals are either not suspending doctors or they're suspending them and not reporting that to the Data Bank. If they're not reporting the suspensions, they're not following federal law. On top of that, they're not being punished for breaking that law.

What Would Cars Be Like Without Trial Lawyers?

There's a great illustration at the Web site of the American Association for Justice that shows what our automobiles might be like today were it not for the efforts of plaintiff trial lawyers over the years. There is also a lengthy report titled Driven to Safety that details the improvements in safety that have been largely the results of lawsuits filed against auto manufacturers. Here is a brief description:

In the wake of Toyota’s sudden acceleration scandal, automobile safety is once again a hot-button issue. After internal documents showed Toyota knew about potential defects, hid them from regulators, and even bragged about saving money from limiting its recalls, Toyota received the largest fine ever levied against an auto manufacturer.

After 50 deaths and 8.5 million recalled cars, this saga is yet another example of regulation as an incomplete safeguard and manufacturers that put profits over safety. Unfortunately, this scenario has been repeating itself for decades.

In the 1960s, court cases began highlighting the dangers of car design and the willful negligence of manufacturers in designing cars that they knew to be unsafe. Since then the civil justice system has worked hand-in-hand with regulation to protect Americans, while spurring generations of safety innovations.

Litigation will ultimately play a key role in identifying what went wrong with Toyota. These findings will aid regulators and legislators in protecting the American public in the future. By holding manufacturers accountable, the civil justice system will continue to spur safety innovations, as it has done for half a century.

 

Friday Fun

I love this beer commercial:

I continue my rant against tanning beds. I think these things are dangerous, and I'm frustrated that my friends and employees continue to use them.

Here are excerpts from an article in the Washington Post about tanning salons:

The Food and Drug Administration called its March 25 hearing in the wake of a report by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization. That report, which covered X-rays and other devices that emit radiation, reclassified tanning beds into the highest cancer risk category -- "carcinogenic to humans," along with substances such as tobacco smoke and asbestos. Previously, WHO had classified tanning lamps as "probably" carcinogenic.

The report, published in the journal Lancet Oncology last summer, said that the risk of melanoma increases by 75 percent when use of tanning beds starts before age 30.

Since the mid-1980s, the FDA has regulated tanning beds as Class I medical devices, putting them in the same low-risk category as bandages and tongue depressors. At the hearing, most of the presenters asked the advisory panel to recommend that the FDA either ban the machines outright or at least more strictly regulate their use, especially by minors.

In the end, the panel urged the FDA to make tanning beds Class II or III devices, which would allow the FDA to regulate them more closely. It also recommended that more prominent warning labels be required. (The $5 billion tanning industry is also facing a new 10 percent tax on tanning-bed fees starting July 1, a component of the new health-care legislation. )

Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer, and the CDC estimates that 65 to 90 percent of those tumors are caused by exposure to ultraviolet light or sunlight. Like the sun, tanning beds produce UVA and UVB rays, as well as Vitamin D. Most tanning beds emit about 95 percent UVA rays, which penetrate deep into the skin and give that bronzed look that many people find attractive, and 5 percent UVB rays, which hit the top layers and are most responsible for sunburns. According to the WHO, tanning beds are many times stronger than the midday summer sun in most countries and are therefore more dangerous.

There has been much talk in both medical and legal circles recently about the oral contraceptives Yasmin and Yaz. The Los Angeles Times ran a good story about the contradictory test results on these products, and the confusion as to whether they might cause a greater risk of blood clots in young women. If you take one of these drugs please read the article. Here are the opening paragraphs:

When the oral contraceptives Yasmin and Yaz came on the market in 2001 and 2006, respectively, they were thought to be safer than other birth control pills because they contained a different kind of synthetic progestin.

But in a flurry of lawsuits against the pills' maker, Bayer HealthCare, attorneys claim that the progestin contained in the pills, drospirenone, is the cause of health problems, including deep vein thrombosis (blood clots in the deep veins), strokes, heart attacks and gallbladder disease.

As of mid-February, about 1,100 lawsuits had been filed in the United States against Bayer, which stands behind the safety of the pills.

Research on the issue is divided. Some studies have found drospirenone to pose no greater health risk than other birth control pills; some studies show a sixfold greater risk of getting blood clots, even in young, healthy women. More research is being performed on the safety of the contraceptives, but for now, women considering taking the pills will need to weigh the contradictory information themselves.

 

Tanning Beds May Get Closer Scrutiny Based On Findings About Skin Cancer Risk

I continue my rant against tanning beds. I think these things are dangerous, and I'm frustrated that my friends and employees continue to use them.

Here are excerpts from an article in the Washington Post about tanning salons:

The Food and Drug Administration called its March 25 hearing in the wake of a report by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization. That report, which covered X-rays and other devices that emit radiation, reclassified tanning beds into the highest cancer risk category -- "carcinogenic to humans," along with substances such as tobacco smoke and asbestos. Previously, WHO had classified tanning lamps as "probably" carcinogenic.

The report, published in the journal Lancet Oncology last summer, said that the risk of melanoma increases by 75 percent when use of tanning beds starts before age 30.

Since the mid-1980s, the FDA has regulated tanning beds as Class I medical devices, putting them in the same low-risk category as bandages and tongue depressors. At the hearing, most of the presenters asked the advisory panel to recommend that the FDA either ban the machines outright or at least more strictly regulate their use, especially by minors.

In the end, the panel urged the FDA to make tanning beds Class II or III devices, which would allow the FDA to regulate them more closely. It also recommended that more prominent warning labels be required. (The $5 billion tanning industry is also facing a new 10 percent tax on tanning-bed fees starting July 1, a component of the new health-care legislation. )

Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer, and the CDC estimates that 65 to 90 percent of those tumors are caused by exposure to ultraviolet light or sunlight. Like the sun, tanning beds produce UVA and UVB rays, as well as Vitamin D. Most tanning beds emit about 95 percent UVA rays, which penetrate deep into the skin and give that bronzed look that many people find attractive, and 5 percent UVB rays, which hit the top layers and are most responsible for sunburns. According to the WHO, tanning beds are many times stronger than the midday summer sun in most countries and are therefore more dangerous.

Yasmin and Yaz Birth Control Pills Cause Concern, But Are They Dangerous

There has been much talk in both medical and legal circles recently about the oral contraceptives Yasmin and Yaz. The Los Angeles Times ran a good story about the contradictory test results on these products, and the confusion as to whether they might cause a greater risk of blood clots in young women. If you take one of these drugs please read the article. Here are the opening paragraphs:

When the oral contraceptives Yasmin and Yaz came on the market in 2001 and 2006, respectively, they were thought to be safer than other birth control pills because they contained a different kind of synthetic progestin.

But in a flurry of lawsuits against the pills' maker, Bayer HealthCare, attorneys claim that the progestin contained in the pills, drospirenone, is the cause of health problems, including deep vein thrombosis (blood clots in the deep veins), strokes, heart attacks and gallbladder disease.

As of mid-February, about 1,100 lawsuits had been filed in the United States against Bayer, which stands behind the safety of the pills.

Research on the issue is divided. Some studies have found drospirenone to pose no greater health risk than other birth control pills; some studies show a sixfold greater risk of getting blood clots, even in young, healthy women. More research is being performed on the safety of the contraceptives, but for now, women considering taking the pills will need to weigh the contradictory information themselves.