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

The business lobbying titan that is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce also engages in Flat Earth behavior, particularly when the subject is climate change. Their official position is that 99% of climatologists and researchers are either wrong or simply making it up when they claim that our planet is getting warmer due to carbon emissions. And they are pleased to present you with a list of the dozen or so scientists who don’t believe in global warming.

The major difference between the Flat Earth Society and the tobacco and manufacturing companies is that the Flat Earth Society actually believes in what they are saying whereas big tobacco and the Chamber of Commerce are simply pretending to believe. They know that tobacco is dangerous, and they do know that global warming exists. They are doing the Flat Earth routine because the alternative is more regulations on their industries, and regulations cost money.

Here’s the Flat Earth method: Deny. Deny again. Dispute the evidence, and then the providers of that evidence. Question the motives of the people who provide the evidence. Find someone willing to present your evidence, no matter how flimsy. Claim that the question is still in doubt because of this flimsy evidence. Repeat as often as necessary.

Medical malpractice insurance companies use the Flat Earth method as well. Their premise is that the United States court system is simply overrun with frivolous medical malpractice suits. Anybody who walks into the hospital can go to the courthouse and sue an honest doctor for millions of dollars. Why, there must be hundreds of thousands of frivolous medical malpractice cases going on at this very moment. And here are some of our experts to prove it.

Of course, none of this is true. All you have to do is look at the actual numbers, all of which are easily available.  Nobody is getting rich off of medical malpractice suits, and there aren’t hundreds of thousands of them, whether they are viewed as “frivolous” or not. And considering the expense of putting a medical malpractice case through court, an attorney would have to be willing to throw money away to attempt to try a case with no merit.

But never mind the facts, say the malpractice insurance companies. The earth is flat. Those numbers are stilted and fake. The real numbers (our numbers) are skyrocketing. All the cases are frivolous. Won’t someone in the government step in and help us?

Aside from merely pretending to believe what the Flat Earth Society actually does believe, another key difference is that medical malpractice insurance companies are able to get others to believe them as well. Hundreds of state and federal legislators believe, despite all the evidence and numbers to the contrary, that there is a medical malpractice crisis that needs to be regulated. There are now incredibly restrictive laws that favor the insurance companies rather than the injured patient in almost every state in America.  Sadly, none of this will come out until the victims stories are told one by one.

Fortunately, Maryland, D.C. and Virginia are not under the draconian restrictions that exist in Texas. There are some obstacles here, such as caps on pain and suffering, but fortunately they are relatively minor compared to Texas. As experienced medical malpractice lawyers, we are well versed in the obstacles that have been placed in the way of the injured. But bear in mind that the Flat Earth mindset is working for medical malpractice insurance companies. It can work in the state houses in Richmond and Annapolis and it can certainly work on Capitol Hill. We would urge you to contact your state or federal representative and remind them that despite what they might have heard, the earth is still round.

Greenberg and Bederman is a Washington DC Metropolitan area-based medical malpractice firm. We are currently offering legal assistance to anyone in the Washington, D.C. area who has been injured due to the negligence of a doctor or other medical professional. If you or a loved one has been a victim of medical malpractice in Maryland, Virginia or Washington, D.C, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

We saw a huge demonstration of that during Hurricane Katrina. Before that storm even made landfall, insurance companies were preparing press releases offering their condolences for “The Gulf Coast Flood,” which let everyone know how they were going to respond before there was any damage at all. They essentially offered a blanket denial of every claim in Louisiana, Florida, Mississippi, and practically the entire Southeastern United States. They were even denying damage claims in areas that were not even remotely close to standing bodies of water. Their motto was “It was a flood. Prove it wasn’t.” And when it wasn’t possible for insurers to claim that it was a flood that did the damage, they used the argument that it was a “storm surge,” which, to the best of our understanding, is not like wind because its origin point is a water-based hurricane. So, if it was wind that tore your roof off, they would be happy to replace it, but because the wind came from a hurricane, that renders your claim invalid.

This strategy brought hundreds of people to court, including a pro-tort reform U.S. Senator. Many of those cases involving Katrina and denied claims are still pending to this day. There is a chance that insurance companies in Vermont, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut might behave in a more even handed and fair manner after Hurricane Irene, but we doubt it.

We don’t expect insurance companies to pay for things that they aren’t responsible for. If a house has seven feet of water in the basement after days and days of steady rain, the damage may not be the insurance company’s responsibility. But if the wind from a hurricane causes a tree to fall on a house, thus destroying it, you can hardly expect anyone to believe that a “water based storm surge” is the culprit. 

We hate to be cynical about insurance companies, but we didn’t just pull this mindset out of thin air. As injury attorneys in the Washington, D.C. area, a great many of our cases involve going to court against insurance companies. It has been our experience and the experience of our clients in D.C, Maryland and Northern Virginia that they don’t have a “good neighbor,” they aren’t in “good hands” and nobody is “on their side” except us. The initial reaction of your average insurance claims adjuster isn’t “how can we help,” but rather “how can we get out of this?”

Who knows? Maybe we’ll be wrong. Maybe the insurers will give damage claims their due consideration and will treat each one individually. If they did that, maybe they would put us out of business. 

We hope there won’t be blanket denials that are delivered sight unseen.

Greeberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. As part of our injury law practice, we often help deal with insurance disputes. If you or a loved one has been injured due to no fault of your own and is experiencing resistance from any insurance companies, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation.

Cars with transponders are disappearing from parking lots and driveways just as fast as cars with alarms, clubs and OnStar. But the one big difference between the earlier thefts and the thefts that are happening now is that insurance companies are often refusing to cover the owners of cars with transponder systems. They are doing so on the grounds that they believe transponder technology to be unbreakable, so they are essentially making the assumption that everyone who has had their cars stolen is lying.

A 2006 article in Wireddetailed this problem quite clearly. There are multiple instances in this article where people had their cars stolen only to be treated like criminals themselves by the insurance companies. Most specifically, there is the story of Emad Wasseff, who got grilled by insurance adjusters over everything from the state of his finances to his marital troubles and still ended up paying around $800 a month for a car that he didn’t own anymore.

We found this article particularly interesting for a few reasons; Insurers know absolutely everything there is to know about cars. They know the fuel economies, the engine sizes, and safety ratings. They know how cars perform in certain types of weather, and even what the likelihood of hitting a deer is in every state in America. And you can bet that they know when transponder technology isn’t working. While we can’t comment on every case like this, we know enough about insurance companies to know that they put a lot of effort into avoiding claims that are often completely legitimate.

The second reason we found this article interesting is because we think it might have a direct bearing on quite a few Mazda 3’s that were sold in North America between 2004 and 2007. It turns out that these particular models had a defect in their door locks that made them incredibly easy to break into. You didn’t need slim Jims or lock picks or any sort of James Bond technology. All you needed was to drive your shoulder into a spot on the driver side door and it would simply pop open.

Quite a few of these cars were equipped with the so called “unbreakable” transponder technology, so while simply hot-wiring the car wasn’t necessarily an option, there are all sorts of ways to get around it, particularly if you can use the defect to enter the car multiple times. For instance, many independent companies sell blank transponder keys for Mazda 3’s, complete with programming instructions. The claim is that only an automotive locksmith or dealership can do the programming, but we have a sneaking suspicion that this isn’t exactly a necessity. After all, having automotive skills does not necessarily mean that you will use them for good and legal purposes. Most major cities have more than a few chop shops.

So if a car is easy to get into, and a new transponder is easy to acquire, program and install, there isn’t anything “un-stealable” about the car, is there? Apparently many insurance companies are the only ones willing to maintain the belief that it is.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm based in the Washington, D.C. area, and we are currently investigating compensation claims lawsuits against Mazda on behalf of consumers who purchased these defective vehicles. We are offering legal assistance to those who had their cars broken into or stolen, and we are also offering assistance to consumers who were not told about the lock defect when they purchased the car. If you or a loved one is a current or former owner of a Mazda 3 between the model years of 2004 to 2007, please contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation.

The writers obviously took exception to this. They had an issue with not being compensated for this huge new revenue stream, and they also took issue with episodes from older shows being made available (with advertising,) yet no compensation was offered to the writers who wrote those shows. For their part, the networks argued that this was the internet, which was “different,” and anyway, they weren’t being paid to write for the internet. They were being paid to write for television.  

Both sides eventually came to agreement on various points, and everybody went back to work. But what is remarkable about this situation was how the TV networks took it for granted that a minor change in medium (watching shows on the internet vs. watching shows on television) gave them a sudden exemption from long established rules.

This same sort of scenario has happened quite recently with big pharmaceutical companies, who thought that a change in medium (social networking sites) would allow them to skirt the rules that are in place regarding the advertising and marketing of pharmaceutical drugs:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says that a Facebook Share button that Novartis Pharmaceuticals used to promote a cancer-fighting drug violated its requirements to disclose side effects or risks about such medications. The agency sent a letter to the company telling it that its promotion of Tasigna was "incomplete and misleading" - probably the first time FDA has issued a warning about using Facebook, according to Jeffrey Chester, a privacy advocate and executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.

These share buttons are ubiquitous features on social media sites like Facebook. They essentially allow you to run your very own viral marketing scheme with anything you want. If you like a television show or a band or a brand of cheeseburger, you can create a “share” button declaring your liking of this product, which then let’s all of your friends know that you approve of…whatever it is. Your friends can then choose to share it on their pages, which will then be shown to all their friends, and so on and so on.

The problem is that the share button that Novartis created for its cancer fighting drug Tasigna was a clear violation of Food and Drug Administration marketing rules. When activated, the share button would post the following link and text:

• CML (Chronic Myeloid Leukemia)Treatment – Find out if Tasigna is Right for You | Tasigna (nilotinib)
  www.us.tasigna.com
  Tasigna (nilotinib) 200-mg capsules from Novartis is a next-generation treatment for Ph+ Chronic Myeloid Leukemia in adult patients in chronic or accelerated phase who are resistant to Gleevec.

This might not seem like a big deal, but what this Tasigna widget fails to do is list the potential dangers and side effects, which are considerable:

· feeling like you might pass out, fast or pounding heartbeat, seizure (convulsions);

· pale skin, weakness, feeling light-headed, rapid heart rate, trouble concentrating;

· easy bruising, unusual bleeding (nose, mouth, vagina, or rectum), purple or red pinpoint spots under your skin;

· fever, chills, body aches, flu symptoms, sores in your mouth and throat;

· feeling short of breath, even with mild exertion;

· swelling, rapid weight gain;

· sudden headache, confusion, or problems with vision;

· nausea, upper stomach pain, itching, loss of appetite, dark urine, clay-colored stools, jaundice (yellowing of the skin or eyes);

· severe pain in your upper stomach spreading to your back; or

·cough with yellow or green mucus, stabbing chest pain, wheezing, feeling short of breath.

The Food and Drug Administration requires that any drug advertising or marketing information contains a list of side effects, which is why pharmaceutical companies often have to buy two pages in a magazine instead of one. You will notice that on the share button, Novartis mentioned none of these things.

There have been multiple instances of drug companies attempting to skirt federal regulations on advertising and marketing, and this is only the latest. Bayer was recently required to redo a whole marketing campaign over their line of birth control pills. The initial campaign made the claim that Yaz cured acne and prevented PMS, when in fact it did none of those things. But by the time the FDA finally acted and made Bayer change the advertising, Yaz, Yasmin and Ocella were all firmly entrenched in the minds of American women as the go-to choice for birth control pills, despite the fact that these pills have been shown to lead to strokes, heart attacks and pulmonary embolisms in otherwise perfectly healthy women.

Perhaps these pharmaceutical companies believe that any financial slaps on the wrist that they receive from the FDA for sneaking around marketing regulations are a small price to pay for the enormous amounts of money that they can make in sales.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in the Washington, D.C. area. We are currently offering legal help to those who have been injured by Yaz, Yasmin, Ocella, Avandia, and other dangerous pharmaceutical drugs. If you or a loved one in Maryland, Virginia or Washington, D.C. have been hurt or hospitalized due to side effects of pharmaceutical drugs, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

Morally speaking, there are many things wrong with this concept. And there are more than a few examples as to how these caps exist for no other reason than the financial convenience of the insurance companies.

One example in particular is happening in Nevada right now. A doctor named Depak Disal runs an endoscopy clinic there, and it is alleged that his clinic caused a hepatitis outbreak which affected thousands of people all over Nevada. At issue is this question: Does the damage cap cover “people,” or “incidents?”

In other words, if it can be proven that Dr. Disal was responsible for “one” hepatitis outbreak, would this mean that his insurance company would be obliged to pay out the limit of the $350,000 damage cap only once? Would everyone who allegedly got hepatitis from Dr. Disal’s clinic be forced to share one capped judgment? Or would the cap apply to each individual person who contracted hepatitis? Would any of you like to take a guess as to which side of the argument Dr. Disal’s insurance company is on?

As strange as this argument seems, one court in Nevada actually agreed with the premise, but another judge ruled the exact opposite. So we expect the case to be ruled upon by the Nevada Supreme Court fairly soon. And if rulings in other states are any indication, it could be that damage caps in Nevada might be a thing of the past altogether.

Illinois and Georgia are two states where their respective Supreme Courts have ruled that caps on damages are unconstitutional, based on the grounds that they ignore the separation of powers that was written into the Constitution. In other words, damage caps lessen the ability of a judge or jury to rule effectively on a case. With damage caps, a judgment on a supposedly independent court case is essentially pre-determined by members of another branch, and that is absolutely against the premises laid out in Articles I, II and III.

While we most certainly agree with that on legal grounds, we also find it outrageous that state or federal legislators are allowed to assign market value to pain, suffering and emotional loss. We also can’t imagine that a hepatitis victim being eligible only for a “share” of a judgment rather than a separate judgment is in any way fair. Hopefully, the Nevada Supreme Court will do away with damage caps entirely, and the question of whether it was “one” incident or a few thousands separate incidents will be rendered moot.

Greenberg and Bederman is a medical malpractice injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to people in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. who have been injured due to medical negligence, misdiagnosis, violation of standard of care, or surgical errors. If you or a loved one has been hurt due to a doctor’s mistake, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free medical malpractice legal consultation today.

The problem is that with health care, there is no such thing as a “Usual and Customary” rate. Big insurance companies are able to negotiate lower costs for services because of the volume of care seekers that they bring to hospitals, clinics and doctors’ offices. Once you go out of network, you no longer have the weight of your insurance company’s negotiating skill behind you. So the costs for your treatment vary wildly from place to place. A sprained ankle in Tacoma, Washington might cost much more than the same injury in Yuma, Arizona. It depends on who owns the hospital, whether the facility is independent or whether an HMO runs the facility, or what their billing policies are. Health care is quite literally wide open. There is no “invisible hand of Adam Smith” keeping the price of services up or down.

So for the sake of argument, let’s say you are on vacation in rural Vermont and you break your leg. The non-negotiated, out-of-network costs might be a lot higher than the costs of the same injury at the hospital you would go to in Bethesda, Maryland, Arlington, Virginia or Washington, D.C. So if you paid extra on your policy every month for out of network costs, you would probably assume that your insurance policy would pick up 80% of whatever the hospital in Vermont is charging you. But instead, your insurance policy is picking up 80% of what Ingenix decides is “Usual and Customary.”

And that’s exactly what the problem was. Attorney General Cuomo discovered that Ingenix was skewing its “Usual and Customary” rates so that everything was reported as much cheaper than it was in real life, which lowered the amount that insurance companies were obligated to cover. So if the guy with the broken leg in Vermont is presented with an out of network bill for $4000, the insurance company can say “According to our calculations, the Usual and Customary rate for your injury is $2500, of which we will pay $2000.” This leaves you on the hook for $2000, as well as all the extra money you had been paying each month for the out of network coverage, which was evidently completely useless due to Ingenix.

It wasn’t only the policyholders who were getting stuck with huge medical bills. Most people don’t have the amount of cash on hand that it takes to pay for enormous medical expenses (this is why they had insurance, after all,) so the providers end up selling their debt to bill collectors for nickels on the dollar just so they can recoup some of their losses. So both the policy holder and the healthcare provider lose out, but guess who doesn’t? The insurance companies that use Ingenix software for their out of market billing. Which is to say almost all of them.

All of this is bad enough, but what makes the whole scenario even worse is that Ingenix was actually a wholly owned subsidiary of United Health Care, one of the biggest health care insurance providers in the United States. This is like a professional football team being allowed to bring its own referees to the Super Bowl. Who do you think is going to win out?

We would like to say that this case of price fixing was an isolated incident, but we can’t for two reasons. The first reason is that this rigged software was used by practically the entire American health insurance industry. How “isolated” could something be if the entire system is using the same flawed data? The second reason is that this is not the first episode of big insurance using skewed data in their software to maximize profits at the expense of their policyholders. Auto insurance companies are still to this day using a program called “Colossus,” which uses skewed data to “average out” the costs of physical injuries. Just like Ingenix, Colossus also leaves policyholders on the hook for thousands of dollars worth of medical costs that should have been paid by the insurer in the first place.

While it’s a good thing that Ingenix was essentially forced out of business by Mr. Cuomo, and it is good that users of Colossus are facing similar investigations, these changes have come a little too late for the hundreds of thousands of patients and medical professionals who have been ripped off as a result of these skewed computer programs. We think that the country would be better served if the states or federal government were more proactive about examining healthcare billing software. It’s good that we have firemen, but we have more of a need for Smokey the Bear.

The data that these companies use to determine pricing should be open to review, not kept as a trade secret. Nor should any companies that develop similar software have any financial ties to insurance companies. The fact that Ingenix was owned by one of the biggest health care companies in America is a massive conflict of interest, and one that cost Americans millions of dollars.

Greenberg & Bederman is a personal injury law firm located one half block from the SIlver Spring metro station.  We have been handling personal injury law since 1985.  To learn more about our personal injury lawyers, please read about Andrew Bederman, Roger Greenberg, or Jason Fernandez, or watch some of our personal injury videos on Youtube.