Word: hmos
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...lawyer who, more than any other, was responsible for the $246 billion settlement agreed to by tobacco companies in 1998 to defray the medical costs of smokers who fall ill. And he arrived in Connecticut with a message those managed care-weary doctors were eager to hear: HMOs are next on his target list. "They are second-guessing doctors' medical decisions with accountants and bean counters," he told the crowd indignantly...
...recent Supreme Court decisions that will make it more difficult to collect damages from managed-care companies. He and David Boies, who represented the U.S. Justice Department in its humbling of Microsoft, are leading a syndicate of seasoned plaintiffs' lawyers that is suing seven of the nation's largest HMOs. The lawsuits, which were recently combined before a single federal judge in Miami, allege that the HMOs engage in what Scruggs calls "garden-variety consumer fraud." He argues that HMOs routinely recruit customers by touting their concern for patient health but run their businesses in ways that put cost cutting...
...reform? Because the Republicans are in the grip of the insurance companies, and the Democrats are controlled by the trial lawyers." McCain adds today that Congress "can't get anything done [on the Patients' Bill of Rights], so what is Dickie Scruggs doing? He's suing the HMOs. Is Dickie Scruggs doing the right thing? No. But do you blame him? No." Scruggs adds that "we wouldn't have made the progress we've made in civil rights in this country without the courts' acting when the Legislative Branch wouldn...
Ironically, the mainstream embrace of voyeurism comes precisely as many Americans feel their own privacy is in danger, be it from surveillance on the job, marketers on the Net or database-wielding bureaucrats in their HMOs. "The notion that people should be able to go home and close their front door and shut out the outside world seems to be breaking down, especially in light of the new technologies," says Reg Whitaker, political science professor at York University in Canada and author of The End of Privacy (New Press; $25). "These shows are a kind of acting...
...case in question, brought by Cynthia Herdrich of Bloomington, Ind., was first filed seven years ago, and focused on the monetary incentives HMOs offer to member physicians who find ways to avoid costly procedures. In 1992, Herdrich was forced to wait eight days for an ultrasound after doctors found a mass in her abdomen; according to her HMO, Herdrich's condition was not an emergency. Her appendix ruptured and necessitated emergency surgery, as well as several rounds of antibiotics. Herdrich sued her doctor in state court for monetary damages, and collected $35,000; she then sued her HMO under...