Tag Archives: Medical Issues
Lumber Liquidators Sued Over Formaldehyde Allegations
by Chris Morran, Consumerist
The suit alleges … the company “breached their warranties by manufacturing, selling and/or distributing flooring products with levels of formaldehyde that exceed the CARB standards, or by making affirmative representations regarding CARB compliance without knowledge of its truth.” Lumber Liquidators is also accused of the California Business and Professions Code’s prohibitions against “unlawful, unfair, or fraudulent business act or practice,” false advertising. Additionally, the plaintiffs allege that misrepresenting the [California Air Resources Board] certification of the wood violates the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act. Read More ›
Lumber Liquidators Linked To Health And Safety Violations
by Anderson Cooper, 60 Minutes
[Denny Larson and environmental attorney Richard Drury] bought more than 150 boxes of laminate flooring at stores around California and sent them to three certified labs for a series of tests. The results? While laminate flooring from Home Depot and Lowes had acceptable levels of formaldehyde, as did Lumber Liquidators American-made laminates, every single sample of Chinese-made laminate flooring from Lumber Liquidators failed to meet California formaldehyde emissions standards. Many by a large margin. Read More ›
Anthem Hack: Could The Insurer Have Prevented It?
by Matt O'Brien, San Jose Mercury News
[Critics] say encrypting personal data could have helped. “They claim it’s the expense. Really, there’s no excuse,” said Beth Givens, founder and director of San Diego-based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. “They don’t want to take the time and effort to decode it.” … Anthem’s breach affected up to 80 million people, far more than the 37.5 million actually covered by the insurer as of December, according to the company’s most recent earnings report. Those hacked included not just Anthem employees but also many former Anthem subscribers, many of whom long ago dropped the insurer. Read More ›
California Health Officials Launch Campaign Against ‘Vaping’
by Laurel Rosenhall and Ellen Garrison, The Sacramento Bee
The report says the rising popularity of e-cigarettes – and a lack of regulations to curb their use – threaten California’s progress in reducing smoking rates and their associated health problems. In the last 25 years, California’s efforts to reduce smoking have cut the smoking rate in half, saved 1 million lives and saved $134 billion in health care costs … But the report’s findings on the current use of e-cigarettes suggest that many of those gains could be reversed. Read More ›
New Rules To Limit Tactics On Hospitals’ Fee Collections
by Robert Pear, The New York Times
“With these rules, it should be easier for low- and moderate-income people to get care without having to worry about a hospital or a bill collector hounding them for money they don’t have,” said Jessica L. Curtis, a lawyer at Community Catalyst, a national consumer group based in Boston. … The rules generally require nonprofit hospitals to give consumers at least 120 days before taking “extraordinary collection actions,” which include reporting debts to credit bureaus and using debt collection agencies. Read More ›
The Big Business Of Selling Prescription-Drug Records
by Jordan Robertson and Shannon Pettypiece, Businessweek
Now that data mining has enabled pharmacy companies to adopt the practice, some critics say technological advances are undoing protections provided by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the federal medical privacy law. … Matchbacks have solved one of Big Pharma’s biggest marketing headaches: the layers of physicians, pharmacists, and insurers that stood between drugmakers and patients in the past. “This is the holy grail for every pharmaceutical company, to know that there’s a way to look back to actual script information,” says targeted-ad pioneer Helene Monat. Read More ›
New Rule Aims To Curb Inaccurately Reported Medical Debt
by Ashlee Kieler, Consumerist
[The most common complaints] involve claims from consumers that information furnished by these collectors to credit reporting agencies are inaccurate due to errors in billing or slow-moving insurance claims. In fact, the CFPB reports that consumers identifying as having medical debt are more than twice as likely to claim that the debt was paid than consumers with other types of debt. Today the CFPB took steps to ensure that these issues have less impact on consumers and that credit reporting companies are doing their part to ensure consumers’ records are as accurate as possible. Read More ›
Nursing Homes Rarely Penalized For Oversedating Patients
by Ina Jaffe, Robert Benincasa, National Public Radio
NPR’s analysis [of federal data] found that harsh penalties are almost never used when nursing home residents get unnecessary drugs of any kind. … The agency’s new goal for nursing homes is an additional 15 percent reduction in antipsychotic drug use by the end of 2016. But even if that goal is met, it will mean that after a five-year effort, almost a quarter of a million nursing home residents will still be getting largely unnecessary and potentially lethal antipsychotic drugs. Read More ›
Preventable Deaths and Other ‘Adverse Events’ in Hospitals: News Reports on the Problem Include Murky Official Data
“Hospitals in California have reported 6,282 adverse events to the state in the last four fiscal years. They range from ‘death associated with an error,’ to ‘stage 3 or 4 decubitus ulcer,’ or bedsores,” the NBC Bay Area Investigative Team reported. Sacramento ABC affiliate News10’s own investigation yielded similar findings. Read More ›
Unmasked: How California’s Largest Nursing Home Chains Perform
by Marjie Lundstrom and Phillip Reese, The Sacramento Bee
Knowing who owns what can be critical for fragile patients seeking long-term care, according to a Sacramento Bee investigation, which analyzed thousands of federal and state records detailing the ownership of the state’s 1,260 nursing homes. In addition to identifying owners with at least a 5 percent stake in any California-based facility, The Bee also examined government and industry data to determine how the largest owners and their facilities performed on 46 measures, including quality-of-care indicators, staffing, complaints and deficiencies found during inspections. Read More ›
Overwhelming Majority of Doctors Concerned About Use of Antibiotics in Healthy Livestock
by Consumers Union, press release
Consumer Reports’ poll found that 97% of doctors are concerned about the growing problem of drug-resistant infections — an understandable worry given that nearly a third of doctors polled have had a patient die or suffer significant complications within the last year from a multi-drug resistant infection. Those numbers are even higher for doctors who work in both outpatient and hospital settings. Some 80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. are used not on humans but on animals. Read More ›
SB 1256: Brown Signs Curb On Medical Credit Scams
Health care patients would no longer be subject to exorbitant third-party credit charges arranged without their full knowledge and informed consent under a Consumer Federation of California-sponsored bill that passed a unanimous state Senate floor vote on Thursday, May 15, 2014. Read More ›
L.A. County finds 3,500 more patients affected by data breach
by Abby Sewell, Los Angeles Times
Eight computers were taken from the Torrance office of Sutherland Healthcare Solutions, a company that handles medical billing and collections for the county, in February. The total number of patients affected is now about 342,000. County officials said the county is still reviewing Sutherland’s security procedures. So far, at least three lawsuits have been filed against the county over the data breach. Read More ›