A Broomfield, Colorado company that misled consumers nationwide into believing it was a legitimate law firm has been permanently shut down by Denver District Judge Herbert Stern.In addition, Stern ordered the company, Legal Aid, also known as Legal Aid US, and owner Daniel R. Ketelsen to pay $238,406 in restitution to consumers. Judge Stern also added $100,000 in civil penalties for a total damage award of $338,406.
Key provisions of the Credit CARD Act of 2009 take effect today including those that prevent issuers from arbitrarily slapping consumers with higher interest rates , changing how consumer credit will be provided and used, and who will ultimately get it.
About 1.5 million Graco strollers sold at Wal-Mart, Target and other major retailers are being recalled after some children's fingertips were amputated by hinges on the products. The recall by Graco Children's Products Inc. includes certain model numbers of its Passage, Alano and Spree Strollers and Travel Systems. Graco received seven reports of children placing their fingers in a stroller's canopy hinge as the canopy was being opened or closed. Five children had their fingertips severed and two children received cuts on their fingertips.
Continue reading "Stollers Recalled Due to Amputation Danger" »
Yesterday the nation's biggest health insurers acknowledged funding TV ads designed to kill the health-care overhaul measure, after a published report said the spots were paid for in secret to avoid a public-relations storm. The trade group America's Health Insurance Plans said it put up funds on the behalf of its members. AHIP represents the nation's largest insurers, including Aetna Inc. AHIP acknowledged paying for the ads after a story appeared in the National Journal's online editions late Tuesday.
Continue reading "Big Insurance Advertises Against Health Reform" »
Reminiscent of his earlier role in "Money Pit," Tom Hanks is experiencing one of the most frustrating situations many home owners face - remodeling with an uncooperative contractor. The Idaho Supreme Court ruled last year that a second arbitration was allowable under the contract.The Idaho Supreme Court this week has refused to reconsider its ruling in a lawsuit pitting an Idaho contractor against Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson.The high court said last week its October ruling in favor of the acting and producing couple will stand.
Children who aren't vaccinated against chickenpox are nine times more likely to get the disease, according to the first study that gauges the risk of refusing the 15-year-old immunization. The study led by Kaiser Permanente Colorado physicians found that about one in 10 unvaccinated children got chickenpox, compared with one in 100 vaccinated children. And the small percentage of vaccinated children who develop the illness usually has a much milder form, researchers said.
Continue reading "Colorado Study Shows Risk of Skipping Vaccine" »
The Transportation Department has adopted new regulations today that order airlines to let passengers stuck in stranded airplanes get off the plane after three hours. No longer will airlines be able to hold travelers hostage to delayed flights. From January to June this year, 613 planes were delayed on tarmacs for more than three hours, their passengers kept on board.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and the Window Covering Safety Council (WCSC) are announcing today a voluntary recall to repair all Roman shades and roll-up blinds to prevent the risk of strangulation to young children. This recall involves millions of Roman and roll-up blinds. About five million Roman shades and about three million roll-up blinds are sold each year.
Auto dealers won't be covered under a new consumer regulatory agency after a vote in the House Financial Services Committee exempting them, despite the major role they play in financing car loans.
A Colorado initiative allowing wine and full-strength beer sales in grocery stores has cleared its first hurdle. The initiative, filed last month, was tweaked and prodded by legislative council and now awaits a hearing with the secretary of state's office.
Continue reading "Colorado Initiative to Allow Wine & Beer Sales" »
The pharmaceutical companies that make prescription drugs are looking over your doctor's shoulder to keep track of how many prescriptions for each drug the physician is writing. By obtaining data from pharmacies and health insurers, the drug companies analyze the prescribing habits of thousands of doctors. That information has become a powerful sales and marketing tool for the pharmaceutical industry.
Just in time for the holiday shopping season, the U.S. Consumer Product and Safety Commission held a "Town Hall on Toy Safety" in New York City to discuss with parents the new rules aimed at making toys.
Those opposed to real health care reform are flailing to come up with real, alternative solutions to our current crisis. With all the talk of death panels, government takeovers, and rationing of care, now tort reform has been thrown into the mix.
Yet it will do practically nothing to lower health care costs, and certainly will not fix our broken health care system. However, it will most definitely hurt patients injured through no fault of their own.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has released its findings for safety ratings of 2010 vehicles. The group provides the ratings on an easy to use website at http://www.iihs.org/ratings/default.aspx with drop down menus to quickly see results for most makes and models. New to the study this year is a rating for rollover safety which assess vehicle roof strength. This new element led to the failure of any Toyota vehicles making the top recommendations for safety. The IIHS website also provides several helpful brochures for consumers, including one on new teenage drivers and another on shopping for a safe car.
Children's sweatshirts or jackets with drawstrings create a strangulation hazard to children which can result in serious injury or death, the Consumer Product Safety Commission said. In May 2006, the agency announced that children's sweatshirts or jackets with drawstrings at the hood or neck would be regarded as defective and presenting a substantial risk of injury to young children. Earlier this month, it announced fines against four companies Tuesday for improperly selling hooded sweatshirts or jackets that have drawstrings at the neck, posing a safety hazard.
Continue reading "Hooded Sweatshirts Pose Danger to Youngsters" »
For many of us, nothing captures the essence of summertime like fresh produce -whether tomatoes and corn on the cob or strawberries and watermelon. After months of half-ripened grocery store produce, the wealth of fresh, local fruits and vegetables is heavenly. And for true connoisseurs, enjoyment of the abundance is enhanced when the bounty is free of unneeded chemicals, antibodies or hormones. But how to assess the degree to which our food is "organic" or "natural"?
Nearly two out of three bankruptcies stem from medical bills, and even people with health insurance face financial disaster if they experience a serious illness, a new study shows.
The study released last week and published online by The American Journal of Medicine, may even underplay the dire reality since the data were collected before the current economic crisis. In 2007, medical problems contributed to 62.1 percent of all bankruptcies. Between 2001 and 2007, the proportion of all bankruptcies attributable to medical problems rose by about 50 percent.
Continue reading "Medical Bills Cause of Most Bankruptcies" »
Mattel Inc. and its Fisher-Price subsidiary will pay a $2.3 million civil penalty in an agreement with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission for selling Chinese-made toys with hazardous levels of lead.
The fine, the commission's largest for a toymaker, involves 95 toy models, from Barbie accessories to "Sarge" cars, the commission announced last week. Mattel, based in El Segundo, California, imported as many as 900,000 toys from September 2006 to August 2007 that violated rules on lead levels, the commission said. Fisher-Price, based in East Aurora, New York, imported as many as 1.1 million such toys, including Go Diego Go Rescue Boats and the Bongo Band, according to the commission.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission for the third time has recalled cribs made by Jardine Enterprises because of slats that break -- this time adding 96,000 cribs to the tally of those that could trap or strangle a baby. The move brings the total number of recalled Jardine cribs, sold largely at Toys "R" Us and Babies "R" Us stores, to almost half-million. Jardine first recalled some of its cribs in June 2008, and then expanded the recall in January of this year. The cribs in all three recalls were made in China and Vietnam.
A bill on Colorado medical malpractice claims that would have eased caps on court damages in lawsuits was gutted Monday by Colorado's House Judiciary Committee, which then approved what was left of the bill in a 7-5 vote. House Bill 1344, sponsored by Rep. Christine Scanlon, D-Dillon, if passed, will make medical malpractice insurers get prior approval from Colorado's insurance commissioner before they can raise premiums by more than 5 percent a year. The commissioner also could set hearings on proposed premium hikes when deemed necessary.
Continue reading "Medical Victims Denied Adequate Compensation" »
Yesterday the U.S. Chamber of Commerce announced a new $1 million television ad campaign in Colorado and four other states to oppose "card check" legislation in Congress that would change the rules for workers to unionize.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been aggressively running anti-consumer, anti-rights ads to serve its business membership for the past eight years. This is the same type of biased mis-information seen frequently during the 2008 campaign season. The U.S. Chamber's new ads opposing the "Employee Free Choice Act" are running in Colorado, Louisiana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Virginia. Meanwhile, radio spots are running in Alaska and South Dakota.
The Supreme Court yesterday ruled that consumers can sometimes resist credit card companies' push to move their dispute over finance charges and late fees to arbitration. The justices voted 5-4 Monday in favor of Betty Vaden in her dispute with Discover Bank.
Parents of an 18-year-old Ohio man who suffered a brain injury while snowboarding have filed a lawsuit against doctors at a northwestern Pennsylvania hospital alleging that the staff intentionally killed the young man so as to harvest his organs. The lawsuit claims that Hamot Medical Center doctors and a representative of the Center For Organ Recovery and Education caused Gregory Jacobs' death by administering medication and by removing his breathing tube, causing him to suffocate.
Smith & Wesson announced yesterday that it's recalling all Walther PPK and PPK/S guns manufactured between March 2002 and early this month.
The $605 weapon has a defect which may allow the gun to fire without anyone pulling the trigger. In a memo to customers posted on its Web site, the Springfield firm advised owners of the gun to "STOP USING YOUR PISTOL AND RETURN IT TO SMITH & WESSON AT ONCE." Smith & Wesson engineers discovered the problem during routine tests, and the firm "has not reported" any consumer injuries.
However, an Illinois police officer sued the gunmaker last fall over wounds sustained in 2006 when his PPK/S allegedly went off on its own. Smith & Wesson has denied any responsibility for the accident.
The firm plans to fix all PPK and PPK/S guns for free, including covering shipping costs to and from Smith & Wesson's factories. The company estimates the recall will cost a total of $900,000 to $1.3 million. The Walther PPK is famous the world over as Agent 007's pistol, appearing in most of the 22 James Bond movies released since 1962.
Marvin Schur's neighbors found the World War II veteran's frozen body in his Bay City bedroom on January 17, four days after a device that regulates how much power he uses -- installed because of failure to pay -- shut off his power. A medical examiner said the temperature was 32 degrees in his house when Schur's body was found.
Utility officials said Schur owed at least $700, but Schur's nephew, William Wallworth, said his uncle told him he was worth at least a half-million dollars, and authorities say Schur had cash clipped to his utility bills on his kitchen table.
A Houston lawyer has taken a home equity loan to repay his law firm for $182,500 lost in a variation of what has become known as the Nigerian e-mail scam.
In the case of lawyer Richard Howell Jr., the scammer claimed to be a Japanese businessman who needed help collecting $3.6 million from four customers in the United States. Howell checked and found websites of the collecting company and the four U.S. debtors. His firm Buckley, White, Castaneda & Howell, would get a contingency fee of one-third for any money collected. Believing the contact to be a potentially lucrative client, he proceeded in the collections action.
General Mills Inc. and grocers Kroger Co. and Safeway Inc. have joined the growing list of food companies and retailers pulling items made with peanut butter amid a salmonella outbreak.
The Food and Drug Administration has traced the recent salmonella outbreak to a Georgia plant owned by Peanut Corp. of America, which makes peanut butter and peanut paste and sells it to institutions and food companies. The FDA has advised consumers to avoid eating cookies, cakes, ice cream and other foods containing peanut butter until health officials learn more about the contamination. Peanut butter sold in jars to consumers is not included, officials said.
Colorado Avalanche captain Joe Sakic will be sidelined at least three months after he suffered three broken fingers and tendon damage following an accident at his home involving a snowblower. Sakic underwent surgery with a local hand specialist Tuesday night, the team said. Sakic suffered the injury last week at his home.
The Avalanche said Sakic will not discuss the accident with the media until later today, after the team returns from a four-game road trip. But the incident illustrates a danger that is often overlooked when folks are eager to clear driveways and sidewalks.
Toy season is upon us - every child's dreams filled with dancing Wii, American Girls and Matchbox cars along with sugar plums. But one in three toys tested was found to contain toxic chemicals such as lead, flame retardants and arsenic, according to a report issued Wednesday by an Ecology Center, a Michigan-based environmental group. The group tested more than 1,500 popular toys for lead, cadmium, arsenic, PVC and other harmful chemicals. They said they found that one-third of the toys contain "medium" or "high" levels of chemicals of concern. Results of the study are presented at www.HealthyToys.org, a project of the Ecology Center to encourage retailers to be responsible in what kinds of products they sell.
Yesterday while the national news was fixated on the prediction of Election Day results, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a case which has the potential for impacting people's lives far more than most of the ballot measures being considered today across the nation.
Wyeth v. Levine went before the Supreme Court, with the pharmaceutical giant arguing, with the support of the Bush administration, that the lawsuit should be thrown out because federal law preempts such state court claims. At issue is whether the federal government can limit lawsuits by consumers like Diana Levine who have been harmed by prescription medications.
Continue reading "U.S. Supreme Court to Rule on Historic Consumer Rights Case" »
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued a new rule this past week known as the "designated seating position" rule. It revises the definition of "designated seating position" to determine the number of seat belts that are required in a particular vehicle, and it eliminates the exclusion of auxiliary seats from the definition so that all seating locations intended to be used while a vehicle is in motion would provide the appropriate levels of crash protection.
But once again the NHTSA has included a bar against state personal injury suits by inserting a pre-emption provision in a new rule governing seat belt safety, according to consumer and trial lawyer groups. The new rule also contains language that would specifically pre-empt state tort claims related to seat belt injuries.
Continue reading "NHTSA Protects Car Makers Not Consumers" »
Over the past decade, the prepaid calling card business has exploded into a $4 billion industry that introduces new competition into the market for international phone calls and provided many immigrants the only means with which to connect with family and friends back home. The cards are everywhere - sold in gas stations, newsstands, convenience stores, bodegas and groceries across the country.
But consumer advocates and government officials warn that certain segments of the market are plagued by fraud and deceptive practices that give consumers fewer minutes than they pay for and tack on all sorts of hidden and unfair "junk fees." Some offer cards that simply do not work.
If a murder is committed and a handgun found at the scene, would you expect the police to hand the gun over to the defense attorney? Essentially the Boston police and the Suffolk district attorney's office did the equivalent when they decided to hand over a possibly faulty ventilator to the manufacturer and let it examine the device that shut down during a power outage and led to the death of a 15-year-old.
A former New York oral surgeon has agreed to plea bargain on charges that he was the mastermind behind a grisly plot to plunder corpses and sell body parts for transplants. New York prosecutors say Michael Mastromarino, 44, was making millions by covertly carving up hundreds of corpses at a Brooklyn funeral home and selling the parts for dental implants, hip replacements and other procedures nationwide. The story first broke in October, 2006, see Modern Day Body Snatchers.
Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a medical malpractice case, Riegel v. Medtronic, holding that the federal law, Medical Device Amendments, preempts any state laws regarding medical devices where the device manufacturer complied with federal requirements. By now, everyone is aware of how little protection is frequently offered by “federal requirements” when oversight is provided by agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration or the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Now state law can offer no protection against the negligently designed or manufactured medical device so long as federal requirements are satisfied – feel safer?
There is no medical malpractice lawsuit crisis in America, according to analysis released last month by Public Citizen. The new report, “The Great Medical Malpractice Hoax,” dispels oft-repeated myths of dwindling doctors and spiraling insurance premiums used to support limits on the ability of injured patients to seek redress in the courts.
Continue reading "Study Exposes Medical Care Crisis Fairy Tale" »
This holiday season even Santa is at risk for falling victim to unsafe or recalled toys. Tens of millions of toys have been recalled due to lead paint, small magnets, or toxic chemicals. With all this uncertainty about toy safety, Consumer Reports has put together twelve tips for buying safe toys this holiday season.
The names are familiar to children and adults alike: Pirates of the Caribbean, Winnie the Pooh, Barbie, Elmo. The brands are familiar too: Mattel, Banquet, Fischer-Price, J.C. Penny, and Dunkin Doughnuts. In the past few months, companies have asked you to check your closets and toy boxes for brightly colored but toxic toys, and your refrigerator for foods that may be unsafe too.
Continue reading "No Matter How Loyal, Nothing Safe from Recall" »
Officials from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration say they have dramatically boosted inspections of companies that harvest cadaver body parts for transplant, acknowledging weaknesses in government oversight of the multibillion-dollar human tissue industry that last year was rocked by scandal.
The FDA claims the inspections turned up no serious problems. But an internal task force report urges the agency to establish a method for tracking body parts from cadaver to transplant patient as well as other problems, but operators of accredited tissue banks and others familiar with the industry say the report doesn't go far enough to clean up the problem.
Two years ago, Christian Hageseth logged on to the Internet in Colorado and prescribed anti-depressant drugs to a California teenager with a history of mental illness and alcohol abuse. A few months later, 19-year-old John McKay killed himself in his family home.
Upon learning that Hageseth had treated McKay, and that he didn't have a license in California, state medical investigators urged local prosecutors to charge him with a felony. Last year they did, accusing him of practicing without a California license. The maximum penalty, according to the prosecution, would be three years in state prison and state fines.
The Food and Drug Administration took a step many consider long-overdue and proposed new rules yesterday that would make it tougher for scientists with industry ties to offer advice about approving new drugs and medical devices. The FDA said that most scientists with $50,000 or more in stock, consulting fees or other financial links to companies should be barred from making recommendations to the agency about a related product. Scientists with smaller financial interests would be allowed to participate in agency advisory meetings but could not vote.
Last Halloween it was New York City funeral homes partaking in clandestine selling of cadaver parts, see Modern Day Body Snatchers – now the former director of the cadaver donor program at the University of California, Los Angeles, along with his modern-day Igor, have been charged with conspiracy and grand theft. Both have been accused of illegally trading body parts that had been donated to the University for Medical Research.
Continue reading "Cadaver Parts Becoming “Growth Industry”?" »
Four years ago the Florida Legislature capped certain types of pain and suffering damages in medical malpractice suits, yet Florida doctors still pay the highest malpractice insurance rates in the country. Now, the high premiums for doctors mean ultimatums given to patients - sign away rights to sue over possible medical mistakes or maybe give up your doctor.
We hear daily reports on results from clinical trials for new drugs, and they have a tendency to show positive results - particularly in trials with drug-company funding. A new study appearing on the website of the American Cancer Society, analyzes 140 trials of breast-cancer drugs. In 2003, trials with pharmaceutical-company backing showed positive results in 84% of the studies, compared to just 54 % for trials without industry backing.
In the last two weeks we have experienced four major food recalls - tainted chicken breast strips, foul fresh cantaloupe, bad baby food (taking “organic” a little too far) and that most beloved of lunch-time standards, peanut butter gone bad.
CNN recently released the results of an 18-month investigation into minor-impact soft-tissue injury crashes around the country, reporting what every personal injury lawyer already knows. According to CNN findings, most of the major insurance companies when faced with claims from such cases, have universally adopted a scorched-earth strategy since the 1990’s. The leaders in this strategy are the two largest insurers, Allstate and State Farm.
Almost weekly, there is another report of previously unpublicized side effects of a prescription medicine currently being prescribed to American patients. . Most notably, in late 2004, Merck withdrew its arthritis drug, Vioxx, after a study was made public which showed that it doubled the risks of heart attack. About the same time, the Food and Drug Administration announced that antidepressants cause some teenagers to think more about suicide.
According to the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation, an Austin-based watchdog group, some 800,000 companies, government agencies and other organizations can tap into personal medical information almost at will. Pharmaceutical information is mined daily, your prescriptions, are an open book to all sorts of companies that don't have to tell you what they're doing with the information.
Continue reading "Money Paid for Your Medical Data (but not to you!)" »
With fewer and fewer public places to light up, don’t you wonder about those poor souls still huddled outside in frigid weather, dragging on a cigarette? Well, if they haven’t kicked the habit yet, Big Tobacco is making it more difficult to do just that, according to a study just released by Harvard.
Since 2003, at least one U.S. child has died and 19 others have needed surgery after accidentally swallowing magnets used in toys, the government reported last week. Most of those cases were believed to involve tiny but strong "rare earth" magnets that can link together in children's digestive tracts, blocking and even perforating the intestines, the researchers said.
Just when you thought it was safe to venture back down the produce aisle...Green onions that are suspected of containing a virulent form of E. Coli has sickened Taco Bell customers in six states. It has been determined that the contaminated onions were grown in California by one of Ventura County's largest vegetable growers.
In 2003, after intense lobbying by the politically powerful trucking industry, regulators rejected proposals to tighten drivers’ hours and instead did the opposite, relaxing the rules on how long truckers could be on the road. Government officials had also turned down repeated requests from insurers and safety groups for more rigorous training for new drivers.
Florida recently amended its state constitution to limit attorney fees in medical malpractice cases. The Florida Supreme Court has ruled that attorney fee limits in medical malpractice cases can be waived—as long as lawyers fully inform their clients about the rights they are giving up and plaintiffs show they have done so voluntarily. The Florida Bar Association argued that fee limits interfere with plaintiffs’ right to find counsel of their own choice, and the Court agreed.
Continue reading "Limits on Med Mal Fees Barrier to Justice" »
Consumer Product Safety Council (CPSC) has reports of 20 toy-related deaths involving children under age 15 that occurred in 2005. Nine of these deaths occurred when a child choked or aspirated on a small ball or other toy parts. Also, in 2005 an estimated 152,400 children under 15 years old were treated for toy-related injuries in U.S. hospital emergency rooms. The majority of these injuries were not the result of a recalled or dangerous product. Instead, injuries from riding toys such as falls, made up a significant number of the injuries. To avoid such tragedies this holiday season, CPSC and the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) are working together to make this holiday season a safe one by warning all gift givers about the five toy hazards that can take all the fun out of any celebration.
A new national study reveals that school bus-related accidents send 17,000 U.S. children to emergency rooms each year, more than double the number in previous estimates that only included crashes.
Continue reading "School Bus Injuries Double Previous Estimates" »
A horrific tale most appropriate for Hallow's Eve - on February 23, 2006 in Brooklyn State Supreme Court, four men were arraigned on a series of charges reading like Robert Louis Stevenson’s saga The Body Snatchers. Prosecutors claimed that the men, who worked for a company called Biomedical Tissue Services, had engaged in a modern form of body-snatching. A ghoulish ring trafficking in bones, tissue and other body parts illicitly harvested from corpses at funeral homes throughout New York City potentially raked in millions of dollars selling tendons and ligaments for surgical replacement and bone for dental implants and orthopedic reconstruction procedures, sources familiar with the investigation said.
Caveat emptor that cadaver! A Connecticut Superior Court judge has ruled in favor of a business accused of providing a defective heart valve for transplantation, saying that such human tissue is not a product for the purposes of a product liability claim. The issue of whether to consider processed tissue a product has been addressed by only a handful of opinions—including a California case and a federal court interpreting Utah law and all have held as the Connecticut court did.
Home is where the heart is, but it may also be where the danger resides. In 2001, there were 33,200 accidental deaths in the home. The four leading causes of such fatalities are, in order: poisoning, falls, suffocation from an ingested object, and fires and burns. While no age group is invulnerable, the two most at-risk groups are children under age 4 and the elderly.
Common wisdom is that the best thing for our children is to get them outside to play - but this may not be such good advice if they head for the background playset. A surprising report released by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) revealed that over a ten year period, more children died from injuries sustained on backyard playground equipment than on public playgrounds. Data on playground related deaths reported to the agency from January 1990 through August 2000 was reviewed, and studied playground equipment related injuries treated in U.S. hospital emergency rooms.
You always knew it was a little slimy, and what it did to the sailorman was kind of creepy - but who thought it would kill you? Well, spinach won't be your only worry in the produce section if Congress follows through with plans to preempt state laws.
It’s not something you do with a rod and reel or an alternative music group. Phishing is an online scam used to commit identity theft. A fraudulent, but official-looking e-mail is sent to a user in an attempt to con that user into divulging personal and/or private information, which is then used for identity theft. The sender is “fishing” for a bite from a few of the millions of recipients of the fake e-mail.
Last week the Consumer Product Safety Commission proposed new factors for determining when manufacturers have to report defective products to the agency.
Continue reading "CPSC Considers Relaxing Rules On Reporting" »
The Administrative Simplification provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA, Title II) require the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to establish national standards for electronic health care transactions and national identifiers for providers, health plans, and employers. It also addresses the security and privacy of health data. Adopting these standards will improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the nation's health care system by encouraging the widespread use of electronic data interchange in health care.
With summer approaching, many famiies soon will be loading up kids and bags and heading out on a road trip. But, over 400 4-to-8-year-olds are killed in traffic crashes every year, and roughly 70,000 more are injured. Research has shown that booster seats are extremely effective in reducing injuries in crashes.
Yesterday the Senate once again defeated corporate efforts to limit jury awards in medical malpractice cases, taking the high priority issue, at least for both President Bush and the majority leader, Senator Bill Frist, off the table for this year.
Continue reading "Victory for Medical Malpractice Victims" »
According to Safe Kids Worldwide, a coalition that aims to prevent injuries to children, drowning is the second-largest cause of accidental death among youngsters. In 2003 alone, the latest year for which statistics are available, 285 children drowned in U.S. swimming pools.
In the face of public opposition and other looming issues, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is now planning to bring Medical Malpractice legislation to the floor the week of May 8th, a week later than originally announced.
Continue reading "Medical Malpractice Victims to Lose Rights" »
Every parent and “weekend warrior” knows that you can no longer participate in any organized recreational activity without first being asked to sign a waiver or release. Many folks assume that these waivers prevent them from pursuing a claim under any circumstances.