Philadelphia Personal Injury Attorney Blog - Pomerantz Perlberger & Lewis LLP

As the summer wears on, most people are getting into the routine of mowing the lawn every week or two. Unfortunately, over 100,000 people were injured by lawn mowers in 2006, and though statistics from 2007 are not available, the number of accidents has been growing every year since 1997. These injuries can range from minor burns to serious injuries like lost hands, feet, fingers, or toes to death.

Do your part to avoid being injured as a result of summer's most unloved chore:

• · Wear protective clothing, including:
• Long pants
• Safety glasses
• Good shoes that protect feet and prevent slip and fall accidents
• · Do not modify the lawnmower by removing safety devices, or altering engine performance
• · Turn off the lawn mower before attempting to service it
• · Keep hands and feet away from the lawnmower blade, even if the lawnmower is turned off
• · Keep children indoors while mowing

However, some lawn mowers are defective products, and their defects can contribute to your injury. This includes:

• · Poorly designed ejection system for cut grass/objects
• · Blade design that is susceptible to blockage
• · Engines that can catch fire or have unexpected hot spots
• · Defective safety equipment
• · Unstable design for riding lawnmowers

Note that not only user-operated lawnmowers are susceptible to dangerous defects. The robotic LawnBott LB3200 Evolution was recently cited by Consumer Reports because its blades continued spinning when the lawnmower is lifted.

If you or a loved one have suffered a serious injury or wrongful death as a result of a defective lawnmower, contact the experienced product liability lawyers at Pomerantz, Perlberger, and Lewis,LLP today for a free initial consultation.

Monday was a hard day for Geisinger South Wilkes-Barre in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, which settled two cases of wrongful death as a result of medical malpractice on the same day for a total payout of $5 million.

In the first case, a woman broke her ankle and went to the hospital on April 25, 2007. The doctors knew that she suffered from several respiratory conditions, including obstructive sleep apnea and asthma, and that she had several allergies to medicines. When she was taken into surgery to set her ankle, she was given Dilaudid, a medication to which she was allergic. After the operation, she was given more Dilaudid by a nurse, even though the doctor had not ordered it. In the early-morning hours of the 26th, she was discovered to have no heartbeat and an extremely low blood-oxygen level. CPR was performed and she was placed on life support, but life support was terminated the next day.

The hospital agreed to a settlement of $1.8 million in the case.

In the second case, a woman woke up on September 6, 2007 with severe pain in her abdomen. When she consulted with her primary care physician, an ambulance was called to take her to Geisinger South Wilkes-Barre. The pain got worse, and she received many tests, but was discharged the next morning with some of the tests unreviewed. Doctors believed she suffered from a urinary tract infection. The pain continued to grow worse, and the next day, the 8th, she collapsed and was unresponsive. She passed away that night.

Her family filed a suit claiming her death was preventable if she had been appropriately diagnosed and treated. Geisinger South Wilkes-Barre settled the case for $3.2 million.

It may not be coincidental that Geisinger has also decided to lay off 400 people at the South Wilkes-Barre medical campus, arguments about the relationship between doctor shortages and medical-malpractice cases notwithstanding.

However, the layoffs seen in the light of these settlements point to the presence of serious quality-of-care issues at the facility. If this is the type of medicine that would be practiced here, perhaps people are better off with traveling to places where better care is practiced.

The layoffs are also symptomatic of the new corporate philosophy of medicine. Geisinger purchased Mercy Hospital in 2005, after determining that it could make the economically-troubled hospital profitable. The downsizing of the staff, and the consequent shifting of serious care to other facilities, namely its Plains Township medical center, were probably part of the plan.

If you have lost a loved one as a result of clear medical negligence, contact the experienced medical malpractice lawyers at Pomerantz, Perlbger, and Lewis, LLP today for a free initial consultation.

Anesthesia awareness is when a patient comes to awareness during his or her surgery. These patients experience a horrific tragedy: they can see, hear, and even feel everything that happens during their operation, but they cannot move. Patients who awaken during surgery often suffer terrible, enduring pain. They may be awake for minutes or even hours during a long surgery, and during this time they feel every tug, every stitch, every cut and probe of the surgery. They also feel a terrible powerlessness as a result of their paralysis that makes the experience deeply traumatic. A number of sufferers of anesthesia awareness have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that endures decades after the event.

Anesthesia awareness is often the result of medical negligence, including:

· A medication not being given

· Too little medication being given

· Wrong medication being given

Modern anesthesia is not normally a single compound, but is usually a cocktail of different medications. In the case of anesthesia awareness, the drug that paralyzes a patient is effective, but other medications are ineffective or not given. Sometimes, however, the cause of anesthesia awareness is unknown, similar to waking paralysis, whose mechanism is explained but its cause unknown.

In some cases, brain wave monitors can detect anesthesia awareness, but in other cases, they are ineffective. The best prevention for anesthesia awareness is thoroughness and good procedure on the part of the surgeon and anesthesiologist.

If you have suffered anesthesia awareness as a result of the negligence of your anesthesiologist and/or surgeon, contact the experienced medical malpractice lawyers at Pomerantz, Perlberger, and Lewis, LLP today for a free initial consultation.

With the temperature soaring and the kids out from school, summer is in full swing, and that means summer recreation, including days at the pool trying to beat the heat. Unfortunately, this also means that kids, especially teens, are at an elevated risk for a tragic spinal injury.

According to studies, diving accidents may account for as much as 14 % of all spinal injuries. The majority of sufferers are young males. Because the accidents typically occur high in the spine, they are often associated with quadriplegia, loss of control of all limbs and the torso. Brain injuries are also not uncommon. These injuries are due partly to the natural exuberance of youth, but they are also due to lack of education and insufficient supervision of pools.

If your children frequent a pool, either a public facility or at a friend's house, make sure they know about the dangers of diving. Unfortunately, children are children and cannot be counted on to exercise appropriate caution, so make sure there is adequate supervision in the form of a lifeguard on duty at a public pool, or that the owners of a private pool are aware of the dangers of diving and supervise activity at the pool.

If one of your children has suffered a completely preventable spinal injury as a result of inadequate supervision, you are looking at a lifetime of very expensive care and it is only fair that those responsible for supervising the pool should pay a share. If you are in this unfortunate circumstance, please contact the experienced serious injury lawyers at Pomerantz, Perlberger, and Lewis, LLP today to learn how you can make sure your children are cared for.

The people who claim that our courts are swamped with lawsuits always forget how many people there are who could file lawsuits, but don't.

Consider the case of Jamy Spradlin, a corporate jet pilot. After working for the same company for eight years, she told her manager that, although she had been a man, she was going to become a woman. Within two hours, she was put on administrative leave. Four days later, the company asked for her resignation. Although she was obviously a victim of workplace discrimination, she decided not to file a lawsuit, since she was not in a position to take on a legal battle during her gender transition, and the laws in Texas, where she lived, were unfriendly to transgendered people.

However, the discrimination did not stop with her former employer. During her transition period, her pilot's license had expired, but when she went to renew, the Federal Aviation Administration medical examiner made her certify her mental health before they would restore her license. In fact, she had to undergo an extensive battery of psychological testing that cost $1400. The claim is that transgender people suffer from "potentially associated medical psychiatric conditions." But the FAA cannot point to a single case of transgender pilot who ever lost a license as a result of such conditions.

Now that she has her license has been renewed, she plans to fight for awareness, fairness, and new policies at the FAA.

The truth is that transgendered people face a great deal of workplace discrimination. If you have lost a job as a result of your sex, gender, race, or age, contact the experienced workplace discrimination lawyers at Pomerantz, Perlberger, and Lewis, LLP today for a free initial consultation.

The Big Dig, one of the modern world's most ambitious construction projects of the modern era has been touted as a model for future development of urban areas, especially cities like Philadelphia with a historic city center that makes it difficult to construct accommodations for increasing traffic volume. Instead, with both timetable and budget overruns, the project has more often been cited as how not to renovate a city center.

It certainly represents a model of how to create a deadly construction accident. According to failure analysis experts, from its design to its execution, it seems the Big Dig Tunnel was doomed for all of the following reasons:

· Its initial design of a suspended ceiling made of concrete was a mistake

· The adhesive chosen to secure the ceiling anchor bolds was inadequate to the task, as engineers should have known, since the same epoxy failed in another tunnel ceiling in 1999

· Engineers working at the site simply accepted the certification provided by the supplier, rather than investigating the material

With these circumstances, the project was poorly designed and managed, leading to the wrongful death of one person. However, the tragedy could have been much worse, with a much larger collapse that led to thousands of deaths.

The Big Dig tunnel collapse has not become a model case for construction accident litigation, however, with most of the contractors buying their way out of criminal charges with large cash settlements, and the only company being held criminally responsible for their negligence is the epoxy manufacturer, who actually warned that the epoxy had a low creep resistance and might lead to failure over time.

If you or a loved one has suffered as a result of a construction accident, contact the experienced construction accident lawyers at Pomerantz, Perlberger, and Lewis, LLP today for a free initial consultation and case evaluation.

Although the AHCA/NCAL had their representative speak against it, the majority of witnesses in the hearing before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law were in favor of the bill.

William J. Hall, speaking on behalf of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), pointed out that when people are looking to put a loved one in a nursing home, it is often done in a crisis situation, such as following discharge from the hospital, and people may be forced to take the first available bed without being able to adequately shop around and pick the best possible facility. These people may also be unable to adequately read and consider the admission paperwork, which is often presented as a "take it or leave it" holistic document, not one whose terms are separable and subject to debate. Unable to compare the nursing home against others and ignorant that they might be able to negotiate parts of the contract, residents and their families are forced to accept the arbitration agreement.

Linda Stewart gave her testimony as both a former nursing-home employee and granddaughter of a woman who suffered greatly as a result of nursing home neglect. Stewart's grandmother's leg was injured during a transfer from her bed to her wheelchair, but despite the woman's complaints, nursing home employees did nothing, and it was up to her visiting family to take her to the hospital, where it was discovered her leg was broken in two places, forcing amputation following the injury and neglect at the nursing home. When her family tried to file a lawsuit, they were forced into binding arbitration, which they found distasteful because it did not feel like justice and did not allow for public exposure of what had happened.

Kenneth Connor, a personal injury lawyer, also testified in favor the legislation. He pointed out that nursing homes tend to get a much better deal from arbitration than jury trials, partly because of the long-term client relationship they maintain with arbitrators. Arbitration also, he said, limits the number of witnesses and experts that can be called, the number of requests for documents and other evidence, and the length of time allowed for resolution, all of which favor the nursing homes, which have their evidence close to hand.

All these witnesses make strong arguments in favor of the bill, and we can only hope that it continues its progress toward law.

If you or a family member has suffered as a result of nursing home abuse or neglect, please contact the experienced nursing home lawyers at Pomerantz, Perlberger, and Lewis, LLP today for a free consultation and case evaluation.

In looking at the Fairness in Nursing Home Arbitration Act, we considered the arguments of a representative of the American Health Care Association / National Center for Assisted Living (AHCA/NCAL), the largest organization representing nursing home owners in the country. Of course, the AHCA/NCAL is against the bill, which would invalidate pre-dispute arbitration clauses in long-term care contracts. Yesterday, we looked at the AHCA/NCAL's arguments in favor of arbitration, and today we will reconsider those arguments. According to the testimony of Gavin J. Gastonberry, who testified for the nursing-home organization, arbitration is more efficient, less adversarial, and faster, but is this really a better situation? Let's consider why more efficient, less adversarial, and faster are not necessarily the hallmarks of a better system:

· More efficient, according to the AHCA/NCAL corresponds to "cheaper." Without having to pay as much in terms of lawyer fees (which come out of the settlement or judgement, not out of the plaintiff's pocket), nursing home abuse can be dealt with at less cost to the nursing home owner's, making it a cost-effective practice to allow abuse to continue as long as it keeps operating expenses low.

· Less adversarial--people who go to court as a result of nursing home abuse or neglect leading to serious injury or wrongful death are often going for two purposes: to achieve justice by hurting the people who hurt them, and to make sure what happened to them doesn't happen to anyone else. This is the foundation of the adversarial atmosphere of the courtroom.

Gastonberry cites the "Culture of Cooperation" that the AHCA/NCAL is trying to foster and that has led to dramatic increases in quality of care. According to his testimony, this positive culture began in 2002, with initiatives like Quality First and the 2006 founding partnership in Advancing Excellence in America's Nursing Homes. It is no mere coincidence that this time is exactly when the nation's so-called "increasingly litigious environment" was ramping up (if one uses medical malpractice losses, which increased by over 40 % from 1992-2002, as an indicator). Instead, it is clear that this so-called "Culture of Cooperation" was actually the outgrowth of losses due to nursing home abuse litigation, that the litigation actually did what it was meant to do, by finally making it more expensive to abuse or neglect nursing home residents than it was to care for them.

· Faster is definitely an asset for people waiting on their settlement, but what the AHCA/NCAL testimony neglects to mention is that the fastest possible method of getting money to sufferers and their families is for nursing homes to simply admit to negligence and abuse and pay an acceptable settlement right away, something it is always in their power to do.

And, of course, all of the AHCA/NCAL's arguments about the advantages of arbitration are not necessarily germane because the Fairness in Nursing Home Arbitration Act does not ban arbitration agreements, it only bans arbitration agreement clauses built into admission documents. If arbitration really does promise significant benefits for people who have suffered as a result of nursing home abuse or neglect, they can still sign an arbitration agreement after the dispute has arisen.

If you or a loved one has been a victim of nursing home abuse or neglect, contact the experienced nursing home abuse lawyers at Pomerantz, Perlberger, and Lewis, LLP today for a free initial consultation.

Since the House of Representative's Fairness in Nursing Home Arbitration Act (HR 6126) has had its hearing in the subcommittee, it is time to revisit this crucial bill and consider its implications. The Act is designed to revise the Federal Arbitration Act to render pre-dispute arbitration clauses in long-term care invalid. These clauses are built into many admission contracts and many residents of long-term care facilities are "encouraged" to sign them as part of the admissions process. This is a hugely significant piece of legislation when it comes to the legal recourse that you and your loved one will have in the event you suffer as a result of nursing home abuse or neglect. We have already talked about the basics of the Act, but it is so important that we will discuss it several times more before it either passes or fails.

Let us first consider the testimony in opposition to the act offered during the hearing. The witness offering the opposing testimony was Gavin J. Gadberry, Esq., a representative of the American Health Care Association and the National Center for Assisted Living (AHCA/NCAL). In his statement, he offered the arguments in favor of arbitration agreements. According to Gadberry's testimony, arbitration is better than litigation because it is,

· More efficient--because of its lower "transation cost . . . arbitration may . . . enable patients and their families to retain a greater proportion of any financial settlement than with traditional litigation."

· Less adversarial--without the traditional agonistic relationship inherent in the courtroom, arbitration is more in keeping with what the AHCA/NCAL calls its "Culture of Cooperation" that it says has recently led to dramatic improvements in the quality of care over the last five years.

· Faster--according to analysis by a consulting firm, "Arbitration reduces the time to settlement by more than two months on average."

For these reasons, the AHCA/NCAL supports arbitration and arbitration agreements, and is opposed to the Fairness in Nursing Home Arbitration Act, which it calls a "misguided attempt to restrict and weaken the Federal Arbitration Act."

We strongly encourage you to familiarize yourself with this and other pending legislation that affects your right to recourse under the law and to contact your representatives. Tomorrow we will evaluate the AHCA/NCAL's claims and consider the Fairness in Nursing Home Arbitration Act further.

If, however, you are already a victim of nursing home abuse or neglect, please contact the experienced nursing home attorneys at Pomerantz, Perlberger, and Lewis, LLP for a free consultation.

It was a remarkable case of "who's treating who?": a psychiatrist told his patient that he wanted to kill six people and then asked his patient to help him find a gun. The patient, rightfully concerned, called police in January 2003.

The murder plot started when the psychiatrist, Richard Karpf, had sex with one of his patients, then felt humiliated by her. He decided he wanted to kill her and five others, dismember them and dump their bodies in the ocean, according to the patient.

The police then set up a sting operation, with an undercover officer selling a pistol and silencer to the psychiatrist. The doctor was arrested and pled guilty in 2004 to illegal weapon possession. He was sentenced to three months in jail and four years' probation. He also surrendered his psychiatric license.

The patients did not feel that the criminal sentence was sufficient, and still fear for their lives.

However, the doctor decided to fight charges of medical malpractice, and took the case all the way to court. However, as the jury was deliberating, he apparently changed his mind and decided to settle the case for $365,000.

Psychiatric malpractice is also a form of medical malpractice. If you have been hurt as a result of incompetence or craziness of your psychiatrist, contact the experienced medical malpractice lawyers at Pomerantz, Perlberger, and Lewis, LLP today for a free initial consultation.

A woman who was fired by Wal-Mart after she suffered a disabling gunshot wound to her spine will be compensated with $250,000, according the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The woman had been working at Wal-Mart as a pharmacy technician since 1993. However, her salary was so poor that she had to work two jobs, and was shot during a robbery at her other job in 1994. The gunshot damaged her spinal cord, leading to an abnormal gait that required the use of a cane. The woman said that the pharmacy manager who knew her was accommodating, but when she transferred to a new store, where the new manager refused to accommodate her disability. The new manager demoted her to door greeter, and Wal-Mart fired her when she refused the demotion.

Wal-Mart says that this is an isolated situation, but it is the second settlement so far this year involving Wal-Mart's treatment of Americans with disabilities. In April, Wal-Mart was ordered by a court to pay $300,000 for refusing to hire an applicant with cerebral palsy.

If you have been the victim of workplace discrimination, contact the experienced employment lawyers at Pomerantz, Perlberger, and Lewis, LLP for a free initial consultation and case evaluation.

Although in the past, the majority of people who were elderly or disabled were cared for in domestic or community settings, the funding of institutional settings like nursing homes and hospitals through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has led to more people being moved into these settings who might be better served in their homes or in their communities. In order to improve the funding available to people seeking care in their homes or in community homes, the Congress in 1981 passed a law establishing Medicaid's Home and Community-Based Services (HCBS) waiver program, allowing Medicaid to give funding to people receiving care in their homes and communities.

Although progress has been made since then, the system is still biased toward institutional care, with nearly two-thirds of all long-term care (LTC) funding going to institutional care. In order to change this, CMS has been offering grants to help states establish "money follows the person" procedures that allow an individual to transition easily and safely between different care settings. The goal of this system is that persons with LTC needs be able to:

· Live in the most fully integrated community appropriate to their needs and desires

· Be able to exercise meaningful choices about their care setting, including their living environment, their service provider(s), and the amount of aids and supports utilized

· Receive quality care appropriate to their needs and desires

To facilitate this goal, the CMS has offered many grants to states to help them develop and maintain systems for non-institutional care.

Pennsylvania has received a grant under this program for the period from 2007-2011, during which time the federal government will cover half the state's cost share for these care programs under the original Medicaid agreement. As a result, the state is investigating ways to eliminate barriers built into state laws or budgets that prevent the flexible use of Medicaid funds.

With the high level of nursing home abuse and neglect, it seems desirable to move as many people as possible out of these institutional settings into private care settings.

If this transition has occurred too late for your loved one, who has suffered as a result of nursing home abuse or neglect, contact the experienced nursing home injury lawyers at Pomerantz, Perlbger, and Lewis, LLP today for a free initial consultation.

With gasoline hitting a record-high average over $4.00 per gallon nationwide, many people are looking for ways to save gasoline, and some are considering driving style changes to save gas. There are a number of simple techniques that you can use to maximize the miles you get from every expensive gallon of gas.

Maintenance

The most important thing you can do to maximize your car's efficiency is not changing your driving, but properly maintaining your car. If your car is improperly tuned or maintained, you will see a significant decrease in your mileage.

Cleaning out the Car

Obviously, it takes more energy to accelerate a greater mass, so every bit of junk in your car that you haul around can make a difference on your mileage. The wrapping from yesterday's QPC may not make much difference, but if you're hauling around your golf clubs every day in the hopes that you may get a chance to hit a few balls, you might want to consider only putting your clubs in the car on days when you are likely to need them.

Driving at Efficient Speeds

Just as every engine has a torque curve which rises to a certain level of RPMs, then drops off, every car has an efficiency curve that rises with dips and peaks to a maximum somewhere in the area of 40-50 mph. Your EPA estimated mpg is based on a cruising speed of 45 mph. Once you get to your maximum efficiency, driving any faster will lead to a decreased efficiency. To maximize efficiency, spend most of your time driving at between 30-60 mph.

Minimize Acceleration and Braking

Your car uses far more gas when accelerating than when maintaining speed. Every time you brake before you reach your final destination, you are increasing the number of times you will have to accelerate to get to your destination. The worst thing you can do in terms of efficiency is to accelerate and brake rapidly. To maximize your efficiency, put yourself in a position to anticipate changes in traffic and compensate with the minimum braking necessary. This means allowing yourself ample distance between you and the car in front of you, which not only gives you more time to even out stop-and-go cycles in traffic, but gives better visibility of traffic events farther ahead.

Drafting?

Some people believe that they can maximize their fuel efficiency by borrowing a technique from NASCAR drivers, known as "drafting." In this technique, a person rides very close to the vehicle in front to get in the air resistance "shadow" created by the vehicle. This allows the following vehicle to greatly minimize the effect of air resistance.

However, while this technique may work for NASCAR drivers on the racetrack, it is neither efficient nor safe for regular drivers, because you have to be really close to profit. How close? Less than six feet for any benefit and ideally touching. On realworld streets, surprises are the norm, and when you are traveling close to a vehicle when one of these surprises come up, you have to brake drastically to avoid an auto accident. In addition, the best advantage given by drafting is by following close behind a semi truck or similar large vehicle, which ruins your ability to anticipate traffic and puts you at risk for a dangerous truck accident. In the end, even if you manage to make it safely to your destination, any savings you might have seen are lost by the additional braking and acceleration required.

In the end, the most efficient driving is also the safest driving. If, however, you have been hurt as a result of the careless or reckless action of another driver, please contact the experienced auto accident attorneys at Pomerantz, Perlberger, and Lewis, LLP today for a free consultation and case evaluation.

In late May, the Supreme Court said that employees were protected against retaliation for complaining about race and age discrimination in the workplace. This adds reprisal protection for race discrimination to protection for employees filing Workers' Compensation and Qui Tam lawsuits.

In the case of race discrimination, a Cracker Barrel manager said he was fired after he complained about race discrimination by other supervisors. Lower courts had said he was prohibited from filing suit because protection was only provided by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which had a short statute of limitations and had a cap on damages. However, the court decided that protection against reprisals was implied under the Civil Rights Act of 1866, although the act does not explicitly state that reprisals are covered.

The other case, a US Postal Service employee claimed she was protected against reprisals after complaining about discrimination based on her age. She filed a claim under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, which does not explicitly mention reprisal protection for federal employees.

Both decisions derived some of their precedence from a 2005 ruling on Title IX, which bars discrimination in education on the basis of sex, but does not explicitly mention reprisals.

If you believe you have been discriminated against in your workplace, please contact the experienced employment lawyers at Pomerantz, Perlberger, and Lewis, LLP today for a free initial case evaluation.

A jury in Easton, Pennsylvania awarded $4,368,847 to a Nazareth man who was volunteering at St. John's United Church of Christ when he suffered a construction accident.

The man was injured one night while working at the church alone. He was reaching for a telephone junction box when he disturbed a stack of drywall, which then fell on him, pinning him on the floor until he was discovered 12 hours later. As a result of his injuries, and the length of time he was unable to get medical care, his left leg had to be amputated above the knee and his right leg suffered permanent injury as well.

Although he was involved in the construction, the man was not an employee of the contractors working at the church--CC Inc. Construction Services and Salukas Contracting Inc--so his suit was not barred by workers' compensation law. The accident occurred in December 2000, but it was not until June 2002 that the man and his wife filed suit against the construction companies and the church. The jury determined that the two construction companies were negligent, assigning 70 percent of the liability to CC Inc, 20 percent to Salukas Contracting, and 10 percent to the man. The church was not assigned any liability.

The majority of the award was for future and past medical expenses, while $ 1 million in compensation for pain, mental anguish, and distress was also included.

According to an article appearing last week in the Pittsburgh Business Times, "Pennsylvania is losing doctors, and shortages are being reported in some specialties, such as neurosurgery, according to local health officials." The article states that between 1998 and 2004 the number of Pennsylvania doctors declined to 32,000 from more than 36,500. In addition, the article states that only 7.8 percent of resident physicians who trained in the state in 2004 applied to practice here, as opposed to 50.5 percent in 1994, which may partly be responsible for the dramatic decline in doctors. In addition, the article states that "There are no neurosurgeons between Pittsburgh and Altoona in Blair County . . . and shortages of ob/gyn doctors have also been reported."

Of course, let us deflate this anxiety. First, why are there no neurosurgeons between Pittsburgh and Altoona? The main reason why there are no neurosurgeons in this area is that there are no large communities in the area. Where would a neurosurgeon be based: Blairsville (Pop. 3400) or Ebensburg (Pop. 3000)? This does not constitute a real shortage. The truth (according to the American Medical Association) is that the number of neurosurgeons in the state actually increased by 20 percent from 1990 to 2004. As for the "reported" shortage of ob/gyns, the number of ob/gyns also increased from 1990 to 2004 by nearly 10 percent, from 1551 to 1694.

What about the doctor shortage? Well, the American Board of Medical Specialties lists 34,313 certified specialists in the state in 2007, so either the ABMS is counting twice or there are more doctors in the state in 2007 than there were in 2004. Or, let us assume that the number of doctors is 32,000 or less, say 31,700, to three significant figures. Does this mean that there is a doctor shortage in Pennsylvania?

No, quite the opposite. A table prepared by the Texas Medical Association to argue that Texas should fund more doctor training, Pennsylvania is shown to have more doctors per capita than any state besides New York, 255 per 100,000 people, far above the national average of 236. In other words, doctors are not in short supply.

Nor are medical errors. If you have been injured as a result of medical malpractice, contact the experienced medical malpractice lawyers at Pomerantz, Perlberger, and Lewis, LLP, today for a free initial consultation.

In a statement that outlines five basic principles and attendant proposals for reforming the health care system, the American Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) proposed a set of reforms that it claims could reduce health care costs by $145 billion per year.

The Good

On the good side, are the following:

Proposal 1: Access to information that compares the effectiveness and cost of treatments

Proposal 2: Encourage widespread adoption of tools such as electronic health records, personal health records, secure e-visits, and e-prescribing.

Proposal 5: Enhanced disease management, care coordination, and prevention programs.

All three of these proposals will likely lead to better quality care at a lower price for patients. By streamlining information and promoting preventive care, the medical system can move forward in making everyone healthier for lower costs. In particular, though, it is the insurance companies themselves, with their use of deductibles for even routine care in many cases, that are the main obstacle to the implementation of Proposal 5.

The Bad

On the other hand, I feel that this is a bad idea:

Proposal 4: Build health care reform around quality improvement by rewarding safety, value, and effectiveness.

What could possibly be wrong with that, you may ask? It seems like doctors ought to be paid for providing safe, effective care. However, what insurance companies mean when they say this is that doctors should be rewarded for costing less in providing standardized, unremarkable care at a low cost. As part of the insurance company's rationale in pay-for-performance policies, insurance companies make doctors justify every deviation from standard practices, practices which often do not acknowledge the full diversity of cases that are nominally the same. The source for categorizing injuries and describing treatments would most likely be the insurance companies' own databases, which they currently use to attempt to low-ball settlements on soft-tissue injuries and have been found to be inaccurate in court cases in Colorado, Kentucky, and other states. Among other things, this kind of centralized medicine database makes patients even more vulnerable to pharmaceutical force-outs, in which a pharmaceutical company can sell an insurance company on a new treatment, which then gets written into the standard guidelines without adequate review.

The Ugly

This proposal is definitely an ugly one:

Proposal 3: Replace the current medical liability system with a dispute resolution process consisting of an objective, independent administrative process to provide quick and fair resolution to disputes while promoting evidence-based medicine.

Whenever a big corporation starts talking about "objectivity" and "independent" processes, you can guarantee they're looking for something they can manipulate. In this case, they are referring to substituting the independent courts with an arbitration system for medical malpractice, something like what is used for the resolution of credit card debt disputes, in which credit card companies win over 99 percent of the time. From 2003 to 2007, the National Arbitration Forum never ruled against a credit card company suing a California customer, and there are reports of judges forced to quit for deciding in favor of the customer.

For a Few Dollars More

With record profits coming in from higher premiums and lower payouts, it looks like health insurance companies are afraid that national health care reform will dry up their cash cow, and they are hoping to substitute their own reform proposals for ones that act in your favor.

If you are going up against an insurance company, you cannot face it alone. You need the help of a lawyer. If you have suffered as a result of a doctor's error, contact the experienced medical malpractice attorneys at Pomerantz, Perlberger, and Lewis, LLP today for a free consultation and case evaluation.