Insurance Category Archives — DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog Published by Washington, D.C. Personal Injury Lawyers

October 12, 2021

Will Congress bog down or will it act on people’s health and other needs?

It may be tempting to get caught up in cynical views of congressional lawmaking, budgeting, and spending — seeing it as gross “sausage making” or in sporting “who wins and who loses” score-keeping.

But for anyone who believes that health care in the wealthiest nation in the world ought to be a right and not a privilege, much is at stake in deliberations under way and, perhaps, soon to reach culmination.

It is difficult to predict exactly what will happen with President Biden’s agenda and his “Build Back Better” package, which contains major proposals that would improve Americans’ health.

October 1, 2021

Experts call for end to a race-based adjustment in a key kidney function test

by Patrick A. Malone

Medical specialists and researchers have taken a big step in recognizing that how they diagnose black patients with kidney disease may be racially biased and harmful to a group that already and disproportionately suffers the illness’s harms.

Doctors now should jettison race-based adjustments in equations used in a crucial and fundamental test to assess kidney function, according to studies and editorials published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the American Journal of Kidney Diseases, and the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

As the New York Times reported, this step will “affect hundreds of millions of kidney function tests performed yearly in hospitals and outpatient settings, both for acutely ill patients and as part of routine screening blood tests. By one estimate, one million Black Americans might be treated earlier for kidney disease if the diagnostic equation were not adjusted for race.”

September 22, 2021

U.S. must do so much more to shield our youth from sexual abuse

by Patrick A. Malone

Grownups got sordid reminders of how much work still must be done to protect the nation’s young from sexual exploitation, as top female gymnasts assailed the FBI and Olympic organizations for allowing the wanton predation of a serial criminal and the Boy Scouts offered yet another billion-dollar proposal to try to resolve tens of thousands of sexual abuse claims against the youth group.

The fierce, courageous, and emotional testimony by Aly Raisman, Simone Biles, McKayla Maroney, and Maggie Nichols before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee (screenshot, right, courtesy Canadian Broadcast Co. video) received extensive media coverage. It reflected their fury at how supposedly elite law enforcement agents heard but ignored their charges against Larry Nassar, the former national women gymnastics team doctor who was convicted of an array of sexual abuse charges and will serve a life sentence in prison.

FBI agents ignored agency practices and policy, learning from multiple women of sexual crimes by Nassar and failing to act, misrepresenting what they were told, and later lying to colleagues and superiors about what Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) described as their “dereliction of duty,” “systematic organizational failure” and “gross failures” in the case.

September 17, 2021

Facts and truth-telling matter — in dramas, governance, health, and the law

by Patrick A. Malone

It’s a small occupational hazard that accompanies membership in the Bar — the ribbing that all lawyers take at social functions with those groan-inducing lawyer jokes.

While the good-natured jests typically merit a chuckle and a pass, it’s worth noting, two decades after the 9/11 tragedy and with all the deeply divisive events that have occurred since, that there are clear indicators that the legal profession deserves more credit than jibes. Lawyers are striving at least to preserve their constitutional responsibilities as a pillar of truth-telling in the contentious world. Others? Maybe less so. And the public should not be confused about this.

When viewers see the splashy Netflix documentary Worth, for example, they should take judicial notice that it creates a fictionalized account about trial lawyers and the push to compensate victims of the Sept. 11 catastrophe, argues the Center for Justice and Democracy at New York Law School.

September 15, 2021

FDA snuffs out cloud of e-cigarette and vaping products but delays big ruling

by Patrick A. Malone

The federal Food and Drug Administration punted on a scheduled showdown over e-cigarettes, delaying decisions on whether to allow Juul and other market-dominating firms to keep selling trendy “smokeless” devices while also banning millions of vaping products from other, mostly smaller manufacturers.

The agency argued with a defensive and defiant tone that it had acted on 6.5 million filings and 93% of the requests for approval to market e-cigarette and vaping-related products, rejecting most (including millions of flawed applications from a single applicant).

But the FDA said it needed more time — how much it didn’t say — to weigh evidence from big e-cigarette makers who hold sway over 40% of the market. They claim their products’ benefits in helping adults stop smoking tobacco, especially killer cigarettes, outweighs the harms they cause to young people, likely addicting new generations to health-damaging nicotine and opening a gateway to tobacco and marijuana consumption.

September 12, 2021

U.S. toughens steps to quell surging pandemic as cultish resistance cries foul

by Patrick A. Malone

To those unfamiliar with the history of world religions and disease, the formidable duo shown here are Hosogami (left) and Shapona (right). In two different societies of yore, in the 600s and 700s A.D. in Japan and in the 18^th and even into the 19^th century in Nigeria, the fervent built religious rites around these smallpox deities.

Worshippers hoped various behaviors would appease their lords of infection, with later experts coming to believe that the priests of Shapona (aka Sopona) also helped to spread the highly contagious and disfiguring illness by scratching villagers as part of extortion schemes. Science and vaccinations eventually eradicated smallpox globally, with infectious disease and public health experts historically mindful how fear, ignorance, and societal pressures can lead numbers of people to embrace counterfactual and cultish responses to scary illnesses.

Now, can President Biden and his administration — with a new and tougher program to get millions of unvaccinated Americans to finally get coronavirus shots — back down what increasingly has become a politically partisan and almost theological opposition to proven methods to quell a disease that has killed 660,000 Americans already and is taking 1,500 lives each day?

September 10, 2021

Lethal Colorado cop case shines disturbing light on emergency medical care

by Patrick A. Malone

Manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, and other felony charges filed against paramedics in a Denver suburb will provide the public with a queasy close up look at not only the stresses weighing on medical first responders but also how complacent too many people have become as a crucial part of health care frays under fiscal pressures.

The case against Aurora Fire and Rescue paramedics Jeremy Cooper and Lieutenant Peter Cichuniec provides a grim view of municipal emergency medical services.

A grand jury, empaneled by the state attorney general, indicted the city paramedics and two Aurora police officers on an array of charges in the 2019 death of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old black man. He was walking home from a convenience store on an August evening, wearing a ski mask because, his parents said, he was an anemic, idiosyncratic individual and often felt cold.

September 8, 2021

Roads turned deadly during the pandemic. And, tragically, they’re staying so.

by Patrick A. Malone

The nation keeps zooming toward a tragic and preventable fatality measure: Our roads are staying as deadly as they became during the coronavirus pandemic, and 2021 is racing to be one of the most lethal vehicular years in a decade.

As the Washington Post reported of data on the year’s first quarter from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration:

“The first quarter of 2021 was the deadliest start of a year on the nation’s roads in over a decade, with car crashes killing an estimated 8,730 people from January to March, according to a new estimate from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The numbers indicate that a surge in road deaths that began with the coronavirus pandemic has continued into this year, although they offer some early glimmer of hope that unusually high fatality rates might be beginning to come down. NHTSA said the ongoing high death rate appears to have been caused by drivers continuing to take risks by speeding, getting behind the wheel after drinking or using drugs, and not wearing seat belts. To coincide with the new estimates, NHTSA … released an updated version of a guide to improving highway safety, largely focusing on encouraging more-conscientious behavior on the roads and deterring risk-taking.”

September 3, 2021

Warnings rise that nation’s younger people are far sicker than they should be

by Patrick A. Malone

Lights are flashing and alarms are blaring. A health care nightmare is growing before us and threatens the future of the nation: Younger people — those under age 40 or even age 50 — are sicker than they should be, and their conditions are worsening, not improving, especially with the destructive coronavirus pandemic.

An independent and highly respected federal advisory panel has just recommended a drop in the age at which doctors should screen overweight adults for diabetes and prediabetes, urging that a fasting blood test or possibly a glucose tolerance test be given to these patients and lifestyle questions be posed to them at age 35, not at 40 years old, as was the previous advice.

The United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) — elite specialists who review tests and screenings for their effectiveness and usefulness and issue recommendations that hold big sway, notably with insurers — said that diabetes poses serious and growing risks to young adults. They can benefit from earlier interventions, such as changes in diet and lifestyle, that can prevent prediabetes from developing into a chronic, and potentially debilitating or even fatal condition. As experts reported in an accompanying editorial, published in an online section of the Journal of the American Medical Association:

September 1, 2021

A big sign of more long-term care problems: Nursing homes’ staffing struggles

by Patrick A. Malone

Nursing homes and other long-term care facilities keep bleeding staff, and their inability to hire and keep workers poses significant risks to the well-being of aged, sick, and injured residents — a vulnerable group already savaged by the coronavirus pandemic.

The long-term care industry employed 3 million personnel in July, which is 380,000 fewer staff than were on facilities payrolls in February 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported of federal labor statistics. Terry Robertson, chief executive of Josephine Caring Community, a long-term-care facility in Stanwood, Wash., told the newspaper this:

“I’ve been in the industry for 40 years and I’ve never seen it this bad.”