San Antonio Personal Injury Lawyer - Wrongful Death

Family Sues Insurance Company over Daughters Death

Beth Janicek — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 12:55:58 GMT

The family of 17-year-old leukemia patient, Nataline Sarkisyan has sued Cigna Insurance Company for her death in 2007.

The company initially refused to pay for a liver transplant arguing that the procedure was experimental, regardless of the fact that four doctors from Mattel Children’s Hospital at UCLA Medical Center appealed to the insurer to reconsider and "said that patients in similar situations who undergo transplants have a six-month survival rate of about 65 percent.”

The insurance company eventually approved the transplant after Sarkisyan’s family held a rally outside Cigna’s Los Angeles office, sadly she died hours after the approval was granted.

The lawsuit “alleges breach of contract, unfair business practices and intentional infliction of emotional distress” as well as accusing Cigna of “delaying and rejecting valid claims, which resulted in the wrongful death of Nataline Sarkisyan.”

This is just another example of how insurance companies are a necessary evil designed to make money. If you are experiencing difficulty with your insurance company denying claims there is something you can do – go to this helpful website: Center for Denied Healthcare Claims. Some additional websites I also found to be beneficial are: When Your Insurance Won’t Pay- 12 Tips; Supervising Your Own Health Insurance Claims; and How to Avoid a Health Insurance Claim Denial.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Beth Janicek

Injuries Soar

Beth Janicek — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:16:28 GMT

Nail gun injuries take off during the building boom of the 2000’s. Air powered nail guns equipped with a mechanism that allows automatic firing known as “contact trip” have been in controversy surrounding warnings from researchers and doctors. Some nail guns can blast 30 nails a minute that travel up to 490 feet per second, qualifying the nails as low-velocity missiles. When the nail guns are in contact trip mode they fire those missiles into whatever surface it makes contact with, including hands, heads, eyes and chests.

The regulatory agencies have not addressed the tool’s hazards; therefore, causing thousands of unnecessary injuries. A comprehensive national estimate found that 42,000 people with nail gun injuries show up at U.S. hospital emergency rooms annually – more than 100 a day. These figures are staggering.

A construction worker, Manuel Murillo, shot himself with one of these low-velocity missiles and ended up with a 2½ inch nail deep in his chest causing his death. Murillo’s widow has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the toolmaker Hitachi-Koki U.S.A. stating the nail gun was negligently designed, defective and of “dangerous character and condition.”

Manufacturers are sacrificing safety to boost the sale of the nail guns and something needs to be done about these death missiles.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Beth Janicek

Medical Errors Cause Hundreds of Preventable Deaths

Beth Janicek — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 17:15:05 GMT

According tot the Patient Safety in American Hospitals Study, patient safety errors resulted in 238,337 potentially preventable deaths of U.S Medicare patients from 2004 to 2006. Additionally, the medical errors cost the Medicare program $8.8 billion.

Healthgrades evaluated 41 million Medicare patient records and found that patients treated at top-performing hospitals were 43 percent less likely to experience one or more medical errors than patients at the poorest-performing hospitals.

Further findings included:

“Patients who experienced a patient safety incident had a 20 percent chance of dying as a result of the incident. The overall death rate among patients who experienced one or more patient safety incidents fell by almost 5 percent between 2004 and 2006.However, over that time, there were increases in post-operative respiratory failure, post-operative pulmonary embolism or deep vein thrombosis, post-operative sepsis (blood infection), and post-operative abdominal wound separation/splitting. The most common types of medical errors were bed sores, failure to rescue, and post-operative respiratory failure.”

The report supports other studies which have found that hospitals have an alarming rate of medical errors which result in hundreds of deaths. Further investigation is needed to discover why incidents have increased in post-operative respiratory failure, post-operative pulmonary embolism or deep vein thrombosis, post-operative sepsis (blood infection), and post-operative abdominal wound separation/splitting so that improvements can be made and lives can be saved. One of the benefits of medical malpractice litigation is to investigate why medical errors occur so as to prevent the error from being made in the future.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Beth Janicek