Many people both in medicine and in law talk incessantly about the need to enact aggressive tort reform to protect the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries from "frivolous" lawsuits. This they claim will also short-circuit healthcare costs that are spiraling out of control. Regarding protecting industries from unwarranted lawsuits, is this correct?
An article in the October 14 edition of the Wall Street Journal provides an example of one of the issues germane to tort reform. The article, "FDA Finds Heparin Maker Violations," tells the story of how the maker of Heparin, a commonly used anti-coagulant (blood thinner) received a complaint about a contaminated batch of the drug in October of 2008 but failed to investigate the complaint for almost one year.
As if that was enough of a transgression. The company, as it turned out, was aware that Heparin was linked to more than 80 deaths and hundreds of serious reactions in patients in 2007 and 2008. In response, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declared the cause of the problem was contaminated imported Chinese heparin that the company used to cut corners. The manufacturer of Heparin received the complaint from a corporate customer AFTER the FDA issued its warning about contaminated heparin ingredients from China. It still took this company a year to investigate the complaint it received.
Additional tort reform will make it easier for companies to get away with behavior like this, to the detriment of Americans. I will talk more about tort reform and costs in future blogs.
