Accident & Injury Law in Texas

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The government is taking steps to curb use of some long-acting asthma drugs taken by millions, issuing safety restrictions to lower an uncommon but potentially life-threatening risk that asthma could worsen suddenly. The warnings cover the drugs Advair, Symbicort, Foradil and Serevent. The FDA said they should be used only by asthmatics who can’t control their disease with other drugs — and then only for the shortest time possible.

Big 5 insurers’ profits up 56% in 2009

As the nation struggled last, year with rising health care costs and a recession, the five largest health insurance companies had combined profits of $12.2 billion — up 56 percent over 2008, according to a new report by liberal health care activists.

Based on company financial reports for 2009 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the report said insurers WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group, Cigna Corp., Aetna and Humana Inc. covered 2.7 million fewer people than they did the year before.

The report Thursday also said three of the five insurers cut the proportion of premiums they spent on their customers’ medical care, committing relatively more to salaries, administrative expenses and profits.

Prepared by Heath Care for America Now, a coalition of liberal advocacy groups and labor unions, the report was aimed at bolstering the drive by Democrats to complete work on a health care overhaul, which, insurers have vigorously opposed.

Industry representatives Thursday criticized the reports approach, pointing out that 2008 was a bad year financially across many industries, skewing the 2009 comparison.
“It is disingenuous to look at the profits at one company today compared to where it was in the depth of a recession,” said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s Washington-based lobbying arm.

The 2009 company profits are nonetheless intensifying pressure on an industry already under attack for raising premiums and denying coverage to millions of Americans.

“That’s why we need health insurance reform today in this country and why we are going to continue in the Congress to work on this until we see it through,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., a leading advocate of the health legislation being pushed by Democrats on Capitol Hill.

In California, Anthem Blue Cross, a subsidiary of WellPoint, is facing growing scrutiny over its decision to raise premiums for individual health insurance policies by as much as 39 percent this year for some consumers.

Thursday, WellPoint defended the rate increase in a letter to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, saying that the rising rates reflect soaring medical costs and will average closer to 20 percent for most customers.

WellPoint also said Anthem’s individual business in California lost money in 2009, as the weak economy prompted many customers to switch to lower-cost options. The company did not, say how much Anthem lost.

Indianapolis-based Well-Point as a whole posted a profit, recording net income of more than $4.7 billion in 2009.

WellPoint’s profit margin, at 7.3 percent, was the highest of the five big insurers. Margins at the other four ranged from 3.4 percent for Louisville, Ky., based Humana to 7.1 percent for Philadelphia based Cigna.

The companies were achieving better results at the same time they lost customers.

WellPoint shed nearly 1.4 million customers, a 3.9 percent drop over 2008, according to its filings. And Cigna lost 5.5 percent of its customers, or 639,000 people.

Only Aetna, which also was the only company whose profits decreased from 2008, gained customers, picking up an additional 1.2 Million people, an increase of 6.9 percent.

The shrinking customer base — which reflects increasing unemployment and the growing number of companies that are dropping coverage— was offset slightly by growth in the companies’ public sector business through Medicare and Medicaid.

Last year, the bars in San Marcos started closing at 2 a.m. instead of midnight, a change appreciated by residents, business owners, tourists, and Texas State University students.

But the change, which also applies to restaurants, has meant more work for police patrolling downtown, where the number of driving while intoxicated arrests in the past six months has doubled from the same period in 2008, and the number of public intoxication arrests has nearly tripled.

20 people were arrested and charged with driving while intoxicated between June and December 2009; during the same period in 2008, when bars closed at midnight, 10 people were arrested.

In addition, the number of public intoxication arrests from June to December was 73, versus 25 in that time period in 2008.

However, there has also been a corresponding increase in police presence downtown which could account for the extra arrests – eight officers have been added to the department’s patrol division in the past two years.  On weekends, five or six officers patrol downtown, up from two in previous years.

San Marcos residents signaled their approval of the extension of drinking hours in a November 2008 nonbinding referendum that passed with 71 percent of the vote. The San Marcos City Council gave final approval to the ordinance in May.

Previously, bars and restaurants had to stop selling alcohol at midnight during the week and on Saturdays and at 1 on Sunday mornings. Nearly all bars and some restaurants are now open until 2 a.m., according to the San Marcos Area Chamber of Commerce.

Federal prosecutors in Boston announced Thursday that they have filed a health care fraud charge against a doctor accused of faking research for a dozen years in published studies that suggested after-surgery benefits from painkillers including Vioxx and Celebrex.

Court documents indicate that anesthesiologist Scott Reuben has agreed to plead guilty in exchange for prosecutors recommending a sentence of up to 10 years in jail, a $250,000 fine and forfeiture of assets received for the research worth at least $50,000.

Prosecutors allege the former chief of acute pain at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., received research grants from pharmaceutical companies but never performed the studies. He fabricated patient data and submitted information to anesthesiology journals that unwittingly published it, court documents allege.

Two of the drugs that Reuben reported favorable results for, Vioxx and Bextra, were pulled from the market amid evidence they raised the risk of heart attack, stroke and death.

How can someone who is supposed to be a healer and care for people show such callousness, knowing that his reports would affect drug use by thousands of patients?

Patients who lack health insurance are more likely to die from car wrecks and other traumatic injuries than people who belong to a health plan, even though emergency rooms are required to care for all patients. regardless of ability to pay, according to a study to be published today.

An analysis of 687,091 patients who visited trauma centers nationwide between 2002 and 2006 found that the odds of dying after an accidental injury were nearly twice as high for the uninsured than for patients with private insurance, researchers reported in Archives of Surgery.

Trauma physicians said they were surprised by the findings, even though a slew of studies had previously documented the ill effects of going without health coverage. Uninsured patients are less likely to be screened for certain cancers or be admitted to specialty hospitals for procedures such as heart bypass surgery.

They also often wait longer to see doctors in ERs.

And patients without insurance may have higher rates of untreated underlying conditions that make it harder to recover from trauma injuries, the research team from Harvard University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston said. They also may be more passive with doctors and nurses because they don’t interact with them as often.

Overall, about 18,000 deaths each year have been traced to a lack of health insurance.

A treatment that uses medical cement to fix cracks in the spinal bones of elderly people worked no better than a sham treatment, the first rigorous studies of the popular procedure show.

Pain and disability were about the same up to six months later.

The treatment is so widely thought to work that the researchers had a hard time getting patients to take part when it was explained that half of them would not get the real thing.

“All of us who do the procedure have seen apparently miraculous cures,” said Dr. David Kallmes, a radiologist at the Mayo Clinic who led one of the studies. But he said there were also “miraculous cures” among those who got the fake treatments.

The researchers said it is yet another example of a medical procedure coming into wide use before good studies are done to show that it is safe and effective.

About 750,000 Americans suffer painful compression fractures in the spine each year. Bone-thinning osteoporosis is the most common cause. There are about 80,000 bone cement procedures done in the United States each year, Kallmes said.

Medicare pays $1,500 to $2,100 for the procedure.

The findings were published in today’s New England Journal of Medicine.

Every month, 24,070 Texans lose their health care coverage, according to a report released Wednesday by an advocacy group.

The report by Families USA, which is an advocate for quality, affordable health coverage for all Americans, comes as Congress is weighing, health care reforms pushed by President Barack Obama.

The report says that between January 2008 and December 2010, 6.9 million Americans lost or will have lost health coverage, including 866,580 Texans. Only California was projected to have had mare people lose coverage. “The longer Congress waits to act, the more families will lose coverage,” Families USA Executive Director Ron Pollack said.

Though the economy is a factor, the rising cost of premiums, Pollack said. Between 1999 and 2008, the average annual family, premium more than doubled from $5,791 to $12,680, the report said.

Arlene Wohlgemuth, a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which is an advocate for limited government, said the health reform proposal that cleared a Senate panel Wednesday would amount to a “government takeover of our health care system.”

Texas has the nation’s highest rate of uninsured people: 25 percent.

Consumers should stop using Zicam Cold Remedy nasal gel and related products because they can permanently damage the sense of smell federal health regulators said Tuesday.

The over-the-counter products contain zinc, an ingredient scientists say may damage nerves in the nose needed for smell. The other products affected by the Food and Drug Administration’s announcement are adult and kid-size Zicam Cold Remedy Nasal Swabs.

The FDA says about 130 consumers have reported a loss of smell after using Matrixx Initiatives’ Zicam products since 1999. Shares of the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based company plunged to a 52-week low after the FDA announcement, losing more than half their value.

“Loss of the sense of smell is potentially life-threatening and may be permanent,” said Dr. Charles Lee of FDA’s compliance division. “People without the sense of smell may not be able to detect dangerous life situations, such as gas leaks or something burning in the house.”
Matrixx defended the safety of its products but said it may remove them from the market.

The FDA said Zicam Cold Remedy was never formally approved because it is part of a small group of remedies that is not required to undergo federal review before launching. Known as homeopathic products, the formulations often contain herbs, minerals and flowers.
A warning letter issued to Matrixx on Tuesday asked the company to stop marketing its zinc-based products, but the agency did not issue a formal recall. Instead, regulators said Matrixx would have to submit safety and effectiveness data on the drug.

“The next step, if they wish to continue marketing Zicam intranasal zinc products, is for them to come in and seek FDA approval,” said Deborah Autor, director of FDA’s drug compliance division.

Matrixx has settled hundreds of lawsuits connected with Zicam in recent years, but says on its Web site: “No plaintiff has ever won a court case, because there is no known causal link between the use of Zicam Cold Remedy nasal gel and impairment of smell.”

Government scientists say they are unaware of any data supporting Zicam’s labeling, which claims the drug reduces cold symptoms, including “sore throat, stuffy nose, sneezing, coughing and congestion.”

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A growing number of hospital patients are routinely given drugs to prevent acid reflux. But according to a new study, patients who take these so-called proton pump inhibitors are at higher risk for pneumonia than those who do not.

The drugs — including Nexium, Prilosec and Prevacid — are often recommended for intensive-care patients to prevent stress ulcers, and in recent years they have been given to many other hospital patients, in large part because they are widely perceived to be safe. Experts estimate that 40 to 70 percent of inpatients now receive acid-suppressive drugs during a hospital stay.

The study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association this week, found that patients, treated with acid-reflux drugs faced a 30 percent increase in pneumonia risk over patients who were not.

The study’s lead author, Dr. Shoshana Herzig, chief medical resident at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said proton pump inhibitors, which suppress acid in the stomach, might promote the growth of different types of bacteria in the upper gastrointestinal and respiratory tract, and those bacteria might be the culprits in the pneumonias. Another explanation, she said, might be that acid stimulates coughing, and coughing less might promote pneumonia.

A spokesman for AstraZeneca, which makes Nexium, also known as “the purple pill,” said the study, couldn’t definitively show that the drug caused excess pneumonia.

Handing a rare victory to personal injury trial lawyers, the Senate passed legislation that would make it easier for certain people to recover damages after being exposed to asbestos.

The bill, which passed 20-11 on a preliminary vote Thursday, would apply to lawsuits involving mesothelioma, a rare form of cancer usually caused by the inhalation of asebstos fibers.

The legislation, which faces more hurdles before becoming law, would set a lower standard of proof for demonstrating that asbestos exposure was significant enough to cause cancer.

No doubt, Rick Perry will veto it.