Maryland Injury and Disability Law : Washington DC Metro Injury & Disability Lawyer & Attorney : Greenberg & Bederman : Accidents, Falls, Medical Malpractice : Maryland, DC, Virginia

Million Dollar Pants and Coffee: Two Common and Misguiding Tort Reform Examples

There is a popular misunderstanding about how our court system works.

Many people are laboring under the idea that anyone can, at any time, walk into a courthouse, sue somebody, and walk out with millions of dollars.  Any injury or slight, real or imagined, is a golden ticket that will lead to a huge payday, and all you have to do is go to court and sue.

Did you get into a fender bender? Jackpot.

Did you stub your toe on a curb when you were talking on the cell phone? Free money!

Did a waiter accidentally spill ice water on to your lap? Goodbye mortgage!

Of course, it doesn’t work like that at all, but this is the myth that tort reform organizations like to present to the general public. What they want you to believe is that every personal injury lawsuit is a bad lawsuit, all the damages are overblown, and that “greedy trial lawyers” are soaking innocent citizens, hardworking doctors and blameless businesses everywhere.

There are, of course, some lawsuits that are overblown and ridiculous which manage to actually get to the courtroom. The case about the $54 million pair of pants springs to mind.

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Levine V. Wyeth

Back in 2000, a musician named Diana Levine was in the midst of a migraine headache when she walked into a clinic in Vermont. Anyone who suffers from migraines can easily testify as to how disabling they can be. While the pain is excruciating, there are also side effects like blurred vision and nausea. If you find yourself in the grip of a migraine, it’s a safe bet that you won’t be doing much of anything until it goes away.

The medical staff at the clinic gave her Demerol for the pain and an anti-nausea drug called Phenergan for her stomach. After a few days, Ms. Levine’s arm began to turn black and gangrenous, which left doctors with little choice but to amputate her right forearm.

What caused the gangrene was the way the medicine was administered. If Phenergan comes into contact with arterial blood, it causes gangrene. It is not the sort of drug that should be injected quickly. So just for the sake of caution, the safest way to do administer the drug is through a slow-acting (and constantly monitored) intra-venous drip. Injecting it into a vein any faster, such as a method called an IV push, is an incredibly risky way to do it, partly because the drug is very caustic, but mainly because if the person injecting misses the vein and fails to notice, the Phenergan could easily come into contact with arterial blood. Since mistaking a vein for an artery is not at all a rare medical occurrence, Phenegran is a drug that should be administered with as much care and supervision as possible.

Ms. Levine did not receive the sort of care and supervision that was required when the physician’s assistant injected her with Phenergan, which he did without even explaining to her what the risks of the drug were.

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Understanding Auto Insurance Coverage

Considering how easy it is to buy insurance these days, it isn’t surprising that many people aren’t familiar with what their policies actually cover. Many people apply for and receive insurance online, or over the phone, and when they get their policies they simply place the policy in a filing cabinet without even reading it. And even if they do read it, they have to dig through pages and pages of dense legal jargon that they probably won’t understand.

As a result, many Americans have the wrong idea of what sort of insurance they have, or what sort of accidents or incidents will be covered under their policy. The consequences of this lack of understanding can range from annoying (having to go out of pocket for car repairs) to financially devastating (finding that your insurance will not cover the majority of your medical bills.)

Your best defense against getting one of those uncomfortable surprises is to KNOW rather than ASSUME what sort of coverage your policy provides. To that end, here is a list of the types of coverage that are on most regular auto insurance policies and what they mean.

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Can Juries Be Impartial?

In our modern age of techno gizmos and internet mass accessibility, can juries remain impartial? If you have ever served on a jury, you know that before the proceedings begin, the judge instructs the jurors prohibiting them from conducting any outside research while they serve on the panel. Juries are also prohibited from divulging any substantive information concerning the progress of its deliberations. The reason behind this prohibition is to let the legal system follow its course; to let the advocates convince the juries, and not to have the juries influenced by prejudice, or other preconceived notions that could adversely affect the outcome of the trial.

Despite the judge’s warnings, there is an implicit understanding that juries are not completely impartial, and that life experiences cannot be neutralized regardless of what we hear in the courtroom. In order to minimize these effects, the legal system provides for voir dire, the process by which prospective jurors are questioned about their backgrounds and potential biases before being chosen to sit on a jury. For instance, if during the voir dire process, the defendant’s attorney in a personal injury case discovers that a juror has recently lost a close family member in a car accident, it is likely that that juror will not be selected to serve on the jury, because he is expected to have a strong bias against the defendant. 

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Is A Monetary Cap In Medical Malpractice Fair?

It’s impossible to put a price tag on a crippling emotional loss. If someone walked up to you and offered you a sum of money in exchange for your infant son’s life, how much would be enough?

That’s an impossible question. The idea of putting a price tag on the life of a loved one is simply ridiculous.

But that didn’t stop Texas from doing so. Thanks to a ballot initiative that was voted into law back in 2003, the life of an infant is worth no more than $250,000. If a doctor prescribes a drug that puts a loved one in a coma, again, that’s worth no more than $250,000. If your wife dies on the operating table due to a preventable surgical error, that’s only worth $250,000.

$250,000 is the monetary cap that was placed on non-economic damages in medical malpractice verdicts. What that means is that the only thing you can be made whole for in Texas is something that would cost you money in the long run. For instance, if you make your living as a pilot and a surgeon makes a mistake that costs you your sight, you would be justified in suing the doctor for all the lost income that you would have made during the remainder of your career. But the emotional scarring and pain that you would have to go through in order to adjust to life without sight is, according to Texas law, only $250,000.

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One hundred and eighty BILLION dollars.

That amount of money is so large that many of us can’t even comprehend it. It is an amount of money that dwarfs what any of us can expect to make in our lifetimes, or our children’s lifetimes, or our grandchildren’s lifetimes, and so on and so on.

This is the amount of money that was given by the U.S. government to American International Group, one of the largest insurance brokers in the world. This taxpayer bailout was given to AIG in order to keep it solvent.

If you are wondering why we have to foot the bill of a dying insurance company, the short answer is that AIG doesn’t just do insurance. They do investment banking, retirement portfolios, and, most tellingly, financial securities.

What this means is that, like many other enormous corporations, AIG had an incredible amount of the wealth of their investors in securities that were backed by packaged sub-prime mortgages. These securities were a great way to make steady profits for investors and shareholders in the short term, provided that property values kept rising and rising. But eventually the housing bubble popped, and the result is that these mortgage based securities were not even worth the paper that they were printed on.

These investors, by the way, are not corporate bigwigs with private jets and mansions. They are your neighbors who have their retirement plans and 401k’s wrapped up in this company and its subsidiaries. They are the businesses that employ your friends and family members. They are, in short, US.

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Pediatrics Virtual Seminar

Online Chat with a Pediatrician

Do you have questions about your child’s health and safety? Want to know when
you should take your child to the pediatrician? Ask your questions
confidentially from your own computer during this online chat with Harbor
Hospital expert physician Naomi Shaikh, M.D. Go to online chat.
to register.

Dr. Shaikh attended University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and completed
her residency at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia.

Log onto:
Free online chat
Wednesday, March 11 at noon

This virtual seminar is free and can be accessed from any computer with Internet
access.

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The Colossus Program

Insurance claims adjusters used to be people who were well trained and thoroughly experienced. They had to know about car accidents, repair costs, medical costs and economics. They had to go through each individual accident claim and factor in how much it would cost to repair the car, how much the medical bills could reasonably be expected to cost, how much money the accident victim would lose because of time missed from work, and basically get a handle on any conceivable monetary issues that might come up during the course of the claim.

That sort of expertise isn’t required anymore. These days, insurance adjusters are essentially no more than cubicle dwelling button pushers who don’t need to know much of anything about the costs of car accidents, or medical bills, or economic loss. A computer program called Colossus handles all of that for them.

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The total number of pending social security disability/SSI claims has reached an all-time high of 768,540. That’s bad news. Here’s more bad news :Given the economic downturn, the number of pending cases is expected to rise. SSA estimates that more than 500,000 additional disability claims will be filed over the next two years. If the recession is longer or more severe than predicted, the number of claims could rise even higher.

Congress and the Obama Administration are aware of SSA’s situation and the economic recovery bill includes several provisions to address the problem. The House bill (H.R.1), which was passed on January 28, 2009, includes $500 million to help SSA process the rise in the number of claims, help the claimants receive their benefits faster, and help stop the existing backlogs from getting worse. It also includes $400 million to modernize the computer system utilized by SSA. This will allow SSA to better process and store claims. It is projected that by 2012, SSA will surpass its capacity to electronically store agency records. Finally, the house bill allocates $4.2 billion to help the aged, blind, and disabled SSI beneficiaries by providing one additional SSI payment in 2009.

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Bad Faith and Insurance

On the surface, an insurance policy seems like a straightforward proposition. You pay an insurer a certain amount of money every month in case something bad happens, and if something bad does occur, the insurer is supposed to provide the funds necessary to see you through it.

But as many injury victims have found out, it’s hardly ever that simple.

Insurance companies seem to live in a parallel universe where a contract is more of a suggestion rather than a binding legal agreement. Many insurers routinely offer settlements that are worth much less than what would be necessary to cover the damages. And if these initial offers are refused, they have the time and money to simply wait out the injury victim. They don’t return calls and ignore e-mails, secure in the knowledge that at some point the injury victim will start to need any bit of money that they can get.

This might seem like something that a fly-by-night insurance company would do, but in fact these are standard procedures used by some of the biggest insurers in the country.

For instance, Allstate has recently been exposed as using the “wait it out” method of dealing with those who file claims:

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Pain Pump Lawsuit

Greenberg and Bederman is an injury law firm based in Silver Spring, Maryland, but our practice extends to Baltimore, Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C. We are currently accepting cases involving those who have experienced pain and suffering due to the implantation of the shoulder pain pump during surgery. If you or a loved one is suffering from pain, inflammation or difficulties in movement due to complications with your shoulder pain pump, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

When people undergo surgery, they are usually doing so under the assumption that the procedure will fix what is ailing them. Nobody in their right mind would have a surgical procedure done to them if they knew that they were only exchanging one physical ailment for another that is even more painful.

Unfortunately, this is exactly what has happened to thousands of Americans who underwent arthroscopic shoulder surgery over the past few years.

The problem is not in the arthroscopic procedure itself, but rather in a pump and catheter that delivers pain medication directly to the shoulder joint. This pump was implanted during thousands of surgical procedures and was left there for several days as part of the healing process.

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