Word: medicaid
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...retired cabbie, has a smoking habit that cost taxpayers more than $20,000 last year, and this year the meter is still running. The 53-year-old Miami resident smoked three packs a day for almost four decades; now he has emphysema and needs bottled oxygen to breathe. Medicaid-i.e., taxpayers-foots the bill for his respiratory problems ($400 a month for oxygen, $18,000 for a nine-day hospital stay last year). Despite the tab he's already rung up, Stark still puffs his way through half a pack a day: "I just have this unbelievable craving...
...state of Florida agrees. Last week it filed a $1.43 billion suit against the tobacco industry to recoup money spent treating Medicaid patients with smoking-related ailments. West Virginia, Minnesota, and Mississippi have filed similar suits. Meanwhile, a U.S. district judge in New Orleans just cleared the way for a class action by three current smokers and the wife of a deceased smoker who claim that tobacco manufacturers hid the addictive properties of nicotine. If the suit proceeds, almost anyone who is "nicotine dependent" could join and seek up to $50,000 each from cigarette makers. Says Florida Governor Lawton...
Lawyers also understand that if juries begin to turn on tobacco manufacturers, the potential for making money is mind boggling. There are 46 million smokers in this country and 400,000 smoking-related deaths each year. In the Florida Medicaid case alone, the attorneys who succeed in winning the legally mandated triple damages and collecting their 25% contingency fee would divvy up a $350 million pot. So it's hardly surprising that some of the country's best product-liability lawyers have been eager to join Chiles' Dream Team. Meanwhile, 60 U.S. law firms have pledged $100,000 each...
...fate, the tobacco wars are sure to drag on like a bad habit. This week several major health organizations and a bipartisan group of Governors will publicly rededicate themselves to the fight, waged with sin taxes, lawsuits, and no-smoking areas. Yet some legal experts doubt that the the Medicaid-reimbursement suits will be the decisive new weapon. Says Stephen Sugarman, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley: "My feeling is that a lot of these untried methods have a dubious likelihood of success." But as any nicotine addict knows, when people want to try to stop smoking...
...raising alarms that new financial pressures on teaching hospitals may force them to quit training young doctors, potentially devastating the quality and diversity of U.S. medical care down the road. One such hospital in New York City, St. Luke's-Roosevelt, estimates that if planned cuts in Medicare and Medicaid discussed by Speaker Newt Gingrich, New York Governor George Pataki and New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani all go through, the hospital will lose more than $35 million per year and may have to eliminate physician training entirely. "At some point," says TIME health care writer Janice Castro, "these hospitals...