There is concern by risk managers that the lack of a rebursement by these social programs will trigger an increase in hospital professional liability claims. Several insurers have announced they will cease reimbursing such errors, including Chicago-based Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois.

The study was conducted to give health care managers a clearer understanding of their cost of risk compared to an industry benchmark. This was the first year the study included data on hospital-acquired illnesses. The hope is to use the new data to establish a benchmark against which future liability costs for such ailments could be compared.

According to Crash Statistics Online, there were 12, 498 non-fatal bus accidents just last year. 481 of those bus accidents, 3.85 %, occured in the State of New York. This number is significantly higher then the rest of the northeast and mid atlantic. However, just about any state in the rust belt region has higher bus accident rates then New York and another big state, California, nearly triples our bus accident total.

The U.S. Department of Transportation has recently conducted research on bus and passenger accident prevention.  They have created five phases to help in accident prevention:

    1. Development and Implementation of an accident prevention program

    2. Selection, Training, Evaulation and, if necessary, termination of transit system employees

    3. Promotion of Patron Safety/Awareness

    4. Design options available in the vehicle procurement phase that will prevent accidents

    5. Development of Safety Policies and Procedures

Please don't think of this as paranoia. If the rate had only gone up half a percentage point then The Times would not have even bothered to report it.

There are still people suffering from the effects of 9/11, and New York is not acting with enough speed when it comes to helping them. 

RGG&L partner Michael Glass

Glass’s client was driving a pickup truck on a Suffolk County, Long Island road during the storm. The driver of the tractor trailer, which was traveling in the opposite direction, lost control of his rig on the ice. The trailer portion jackknifed over the center line of the road, demolishing the pickup truck.

The driver of the pickup truck suffered a brain bleed as well as very serious, multiple fractures throughout his body. One of the very serious fractures (to the tibia/fibula) required surgery and the implantation of hardware. RGG&L conducted an early, exhaustive investigation and retained an accident reconstruction expert to reconstruct the events leading up to the disastrous crash as well as an economist to evaluate the economic damages. Glass said he was particularly gratified by the early resolution of this case because it was accomplished before depositions, and for virtually the full amount of insurance proceeds available. 

The injured man has been unable to return to work since the accident. He plans to use the settlement money to repay debts he has incurred, and to resurrect several small business he had previously owned and managed.

Next time you are walking down a tree-lined street on a blustery day, be aware of the possibility of falling tree limbs. RGG&L partners Michael Glass and Jim Forde recently obtained a settlement of $1.33 million for the family of a 38-year-old man who was crushed by a huge tree branch that broke and fell off a decaying tree in high winds. The case, which involved multiple defendants and is continuing to trial against several of them, involved a large dying tree on a community lot in a Queens, N.Y., enclave.  The tree had a history of falling limbs and branches that had caused property damage to parked cars and near-misses with pedestrians, and there were documented resident complaints. The case was settled against the homeowners who had use of the lot, but is continuing against the owner of the lot and other parties.

It could be that the whole thing truly was a freak accident, but in our experience as  New York injury lawyers, those "out of the blue" accidents are exceedingly rare.

The report blames the rising price of materials, high demand for labor, poor project planning and extensive regulations.

We can certainly believe that. At least the part about the poor project planning. The recent crane collapses have been a tragic illustration of the lack of oversight and proper inspections.

"A cash-strapped Brooklyn hospital will stop delivering babies, aiming to regain its financial footing and reduce its escalating medical malpractice costs.

Long Island College Hospital, in the Cobble Hill neighborhood, plans to shutter its obstetrics department pending approval from the state's Department of Health, hospital officials said yesterday. Last year, the hospital delivered 2,800 babies, and it is on track to deliver about 2,200 this year."

The premise here is that mean old lawyers are keeping people from even being born because all they do is sue people.

In the first place, it has been our experience that the only thing that causes insurance rates to rise are the insurance companies themselves. And considering that so few medical malpractice cases even make it to trial, it seems absurd that lawsuits are the cause of rising insurance rates. We reccomend a good solid look at the profit margins of the insurance companies lately. They have taken a beating just like everyone else. The last time they lost money was in 2003 when the bond market tanked, and within two weeks they jacked their rates and blamed the lawyers.

Don't be fooled.

    RGG&L partner Michael Glass recently secured a $1.2 million settlement for a 46-year old woman who took every reasonable step to monitor for breast cancer, including self-exams and annual mammograms. Unfortunately, for two years in a row, her radiologist completely missed a suspicious breast lesion when he interpreted her mammograms, permitting that cancer to grow and invade several of her lymph nodes. Fortunately, with aggressive treatment, the woman has beeen cancer-free for a number of years, but the mistake placed her at a significantly increased risk of recurrence and the need for highly invasive measures to arrest the further development of the cancer. 

If you aren't registered with The New York Times, you should definitely do so. It's free, and they don't put your names on any lists. And the information in this article is completely worth it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/health/views/17essa.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1214861643-dkIuVRsWldrHWAkgc+9Ixg

You can bet that if your insurance company isn't regularly paying their doctors for what they owe you, then they probably wont be very much help when you need them.

For more information, follow the link below.

http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/PracticeManagement/tb/9876

The collapse that destroyed that townhouse and injured ten was only the latest in a series of crane malfunctions.

Either the cranes are faulty or the construction companies are hiring completely unqualified people to do the work.

The end result is that over half of the teens that died in car accidents at night weren't wearing their seatbelts.

Tell your kids that seatbelt use is not optional but mandatory.

For those of you with small children, we think signing up for this service would be a good idea.

Just go to the NHTSA website at NHTSA.DOT.GOV.

State Farm would like to make sure of that. They want a federal judge to fine the two sisters who made copies of documents that detailed State Farm's behavior in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Follow the link for the whole story.