The Great Coronary Angioplasty Debate: Giving Patients the Right to Speak | The Health Care Blog

Informed consent.  Progress away from Father Knows Best is slow. - gwc
The Great Coronary Angioplasty Debate: Giving Patients the Right to Speak | The Health Care Blog:
by Nortin hadler, MD
Univeristy of North Carolina, School of Medicine

"I don’t, and don’t want to sit on guidelines panels. I don’t, and don’t want to sit on the committees that define the indemnifiable. I want to urge my patient to feel empowered to ask, “How certain are you that…will benefit me and what is the basis for that degree of certainty?” I want to educate my patient so that they can actively listen to the answer.
When it comes to angioplasty with or without stenting for STEMI or any other manifestation of coronary artery (or carotid or renovascular) disease, I want my patient to understand that this is not a lottery. You are as likely, or nearly as likely, to do well without the procedure as with it and will be spared the down-side. If they are so educated, even if they value the “nearly” prospect that I discount for myself, I have served them well."

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Concurring Opinions » Victim compensation: different visions for different victims

Massacres yield more public support than other tragedies. - GWC
Concurring Opinions » Victim compensation: different visions for different victims:
by Prof. Julie Goldscheid

"This month’s deadline for filing claims with the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund (the “Fund”), has caused me to review how victim compensation has evolved since Congress created the Fund in 2001, in response to the World Trade Center attacks.  The Fund responded to widespread sympathy toward survivors and surviving family members, and provided compensation for economic and non-economic losses resulting from the attacks, in return for waiver of the right to sue for damages.  By 2004, when the original Fund closed, it had paid over $7.049 billion (in public funds) to survivors of those who died in the attacks and to those who were injured in the attacks or the subsequent rescue efforts.  In 2011, Congress reactivated the Fund and expanded its scope to cover additional injured persons and to provide medical treatment and monitoring for 9/11-related health conditions.
The combination of government-supported and philanthropic resources available to survivors of the 9/11 contrasts sharply with the resources available to survivors of other crimes. "

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OTHERWISE: Major NJ firms: Laterals and Clerks Dominate New-Associate Ranks, Study Finds

OTHERWISE: Major NJ firms: Laterals and Clerks Dominate New-Associate Ranks, Study Finds:



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The McDonald's Coffee Case

The urban legend of the McDonald's coffee case. Watch the video.  - gwc
The McDonald's spilled coffee case

RETRO REPORT

Scalded by Coffee, Then News Media

In 1992, Stella Liebeck spilled scalding McDonald’s coffee in her lap and later sued the company, attracting a flood of negative attention. It turns out there was more to the story.

New, Young Help for Poor in Infamous Bronx Courts - NYTimes.com

Jeffrey Skinner, Columbia 2L, and Philip Hamilton, Esq. - Bronx Defenders representing Geraldine Rojas in Bronx Criminal Court

New, Young Help for Poor in Infamous Bronx Courts - NYTimes.com:
by E.C. Gogolak

On a recent afternoon in the South Bronx, Cordice Smith, a 79-year-old Korean War veteran wearing a Yankees hat, was standing in the tiled lobby of his apartment building — something he no longer takes for granted. Earlier this year, he almost lost his home after receiving a letter from his landlord’s lawyer: an eviction notice.

Justice Denied

Articles in this series explore the Bronx's dysfunctional court system.

Related

• Bronx Courts Trim Big Backlog, With Outside Judge at the Helm(July 30, 2013)

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The landlord claimed that Mr. Smith, who had pleaded guilty two years earlier to cocaine possession, had used his apartment to sell drugs, and so could be evicted. Kemper Diehl, a third-year Columbia Law School student, argued otherwise.

Mr. Diehl was one of a group of Columbia law students interning with the Bronx Defenders, an organization that provides free legal services to the indigent, working in the trenches of the borough’s notoriously sluggish and dysfunctional court system, where there are hardly enough lawyers to go around and cases can drag on for years....

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Another DePuy ASR Metal on Metal Hip Lawsuit Settles Quietly | Dallas-Fort Worth Legal Examiner | Dallas-Fort Worth Texas Personal Injury Lawyer

Another DePuy ASR Metal on Metal Hip Lawsuit Settles Quietly | Dallas-Fort Worth Legal Examiner | Dallas-Fort Worth Texas Personal Injury Lawyer: "According to court records, Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary DePuy, has settled another DePuy ASR metal-on-metal hip implant lawsuit. The lawsuit, MacDonald et al v. DePuy Orthopaedics Inc. et al, filed in the Bergen County division of the New Jersey Superior Court, is set to be dismissed once the court receives formal notice from both sides.

Judge Brian Martinotti, who is overseeing the New Jersey litigation, annouced that the case “has been resolved.”  wrote. “All pending motions are withdrawn, the complaint will be dismissed with prejudice upon receipt of a fully executed stipulation signed by all counsel,” Martinotti wrote."



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The Myth of the Medical-Device Tax - NYTimes.com

The Myth of the Medical-Device Tax - NYTimes.com: "The medical-device industry faces virtually no price competition. Because of confidentiality agreements that manufacturers require hospitals to sign, the prices of the devices are cloaked in secrecy. This lack of transparency impedes hospitals from sharing price information and thus knowing whether they are getting a good deal.

Even worse, manufacturers often maintain personal relationships (sometimes involving financial payments like consulting fees) with physicians who choose the medical devices that their hospitals purchase, creating a conflict of interest. Physicians often don’t even know the costs of the devices, and individual physicians often choose devices on their own, which weakens a hospital’s ability to bargain for volume discounts."



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After Decades, a Water Tunnel Can Now Serve All of Manhattan - NYTimes.com

After Decades, a Water Tunnel Can Now Serve All of Manhattan - NYTimes.com: "There have been 350-pound steel cutters, a 70-foot-long tunnel-boring machine and heaps of Manhattan schist. There have been generations of workers, known as sandhogs, charged with blasting through, hearing be damned, then resurfacing above ground to find, as one worker observed in 1973, that “you’re still shouting” long after a return home.
And there have been deaths, 24 of them, for many years “a man a mile,” in sandhog parlance. For those with decades of experience underground, or who had fathers or uncles or even grandfathers who toiled in one of the three tunnels, the memories are resilient enough to preclude even the faintest discussion of the better fortunes of recent years."


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A Regulator Cuts Its New Teeth on JPMorgan in 'London Whale' Case - NYTimes.com

A Regulator Cuts Its New Teeth on JPMorgan in 'London Whale' Case - NYTimes.com:

Updated, 8:49 p.m. | Lobbying groups for Wall Street’s biggest banks cautioned that a new rule before the nation’s commodities trading regulator “could have myriad unintended adverse consequences.” A hedge fund trade group feared that the rule was “overly aggressive.” And the CME Group, one of the world’s largest futures exchanges, warned that the rule was susceptible to legal action.
Now, roughly two years after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission adopted the rule, lowering the legal requirement for proving that financial firms manipulate the markets, Wall Street is feeling the effects of the rule it fought so hard to tame.

The agency announced on Wednesday thatJPMorgan Chase, the nation’s biggest bank, agreed to pay $100 million and admit wrongdoing to settle an investigation into market manipulation involving the bank’s multibillion-dollar trading loss in London.
JPMorgan’s trading activity was so voluminous that the bank was recklessly “employing a manipulative device” in the market for swaps, which are financial contracts that allowed the bank to bet on the health of companies like American Airlines. The bank sold “a staggering volume of these swaps in a concentrated period,” the trading commission said.

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Claims administrator ordered to halt oil spill claims payments | Legal Newsline

Claims administrator ordered to halt oil spill claims payments | Legal Newsline

Here is the Order

: "NEW ORLEANS (Legal Newsline) — U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier has ordered claims administrator Patrick Juneau to immediately stop business-related loss payments connected to the 2010 BP oil spill.

NEW ORLEANS (Legal Newsline) — U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier has ordered claims administrator Patrick Juneau to immediately stop business-related loss payments connected to the 2010 BP oil spill.

Barbier

Barbier, who is overseeing the case at the Eastern District of Louisiana, made the ruling Friday — a day after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit sided with BP concerning the way funds were being paid out under the Court Supervised Settlement Program under the leadership of Juneau.

BP claims Juneau misinterpreted the settlement agreement and allowed businesses that could show little or no economic damages to receive payments. While business claims will be suspended for the time being, all other claims will be allowed to be processed.

“This order is issued only as an immediate and interim measure until the Court is able to confer with and receive input from the parties in order to confect an appropriate ‘narrowly tailored’ preliminary injunction order as instructed by the Fifth Circuit,” Barbier wrote."
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