Current Events

Two papers co-authored by a University of Illinois expert in the regulation and financing of health care conclude that tort reform has had relatively little impact on the U.S. health care system.

Tort reform advocates have hailed caps on noneconomic damages as a silver bullet for controlling health care costs – as a way to reduce defensive medicine and attract more physicians to a state, particularly those practicing in high-risk specialties. But according to David Hyman, the H. Ross and Helen Workman Chair in Law and professor of medicine at Illinois, there's scant evidence to support any of those claims.

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Syracuse, N.Y. -- Gov. Andrew Cuomo wants to pull the plug on a free state website that provides details about New York doctors' medical malpractice records, hospital affiliations and other background information.

A two-sentence item buried in Cuomo's proposed budget says the New York State Physician Profile website should be eliminated because much of the information is available elsewhere on the web. Scuttling the website would save the state $1.2 million annually.

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Buying a used car in the United States can be a dangerous proposition — if the vehicle has an unadvertised safety defect.

This month, Carlos Solis died after the airbag in a used car he bought last year from a Texas dealer exploded, sending a piece of metal into his neck. Mr. Solis, 35, was not aware when he bought the vehicle that its airbags could be defective and had been recalled, according to a lawsuit filed by his family on Friday.

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Sen. Charles Schumer on Friday called on the Long Island Rail Road to begin testing its locomotive engineers for sleep disorders to prevent an accident if one fell asleep at the controls.

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(Bloomberg) -- Honda Motor Co. is investigating a fatal crash in Houston this month related to air bags made by Takata Corp., the fifth U.S. death linked to the safety devices.

Carlos Solis IV, a 35-year-old father of two teenagers, was killed Jan. 18 in a Honda Accord he bought in April from a dealership that hadn’t performed a recall on the air bag issued in 2011, according to a lawsuit filed by his family.

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The lead anesthesiologist in Joan Rivers’ doomed clinic visit was also the target of a malpractice lawsuit in the Bronx where a mother died in childbirth while undergoing a C-section, the Daily News has learned.

Dr. Renuka Bankulla and Bronx Lebanon Hospital ultimately settled the lawsuit in 2005 for $4 million: $1 million to the estate of the mother, Consuelo Martinez, and $3 million to her son, Erik, who sustained injuries, according to court papers filed in Bronx Supreme Court.

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Jan 27 (Reuters) - Pfizer Inc said on Tuesday it agreed to pay $400 million to avert a trial in a class action lawsuit accusing the pharmaceutical giant of misleading investors in connection with off-label marketing.

Pfizer disclosed the agreement-in-principle as it released its fourth-quarter results. The accord, which must be approved by a federal judge in Manhattan, came days ahead of a jury trial set for Feb. 10.

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Nissan is recalling almost 640,000 vehicles in two actions for a fire hazard and because the hood could open while the vehicle is moving, the automaker has informed federal regulators.

The largest action – for the fire hazard – covers almost 469,000 of the 2008-13 Rogue models, a small sport utility vehicle, according to a report from the automaker posted Wednesday on the website of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

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The anesthesiologist was getting nervous.

Joan Rivers, the comic known for her sassy wit and raspy voice, had been complaining of more than the usual hoarseness. Now Ms. Rivers was on the operating table at an Upper East Side clinic and her private doctor, Gwen Korovin, wanted to send a small instrument into her windpipe to take a second look at her vocal cords, according to a malpractice lawsuit filed Monday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan.

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Johnson & Johnson ($JNJ) some time back agreed to pay $2.2 billion to settle federal claims that it improperly marketed the antipsychotic drug Risperdal. But the drugmaker's legal hassles over the drug are not all done. Last week opening arguments were made in a case in which the drugmaker is accused of marketing the drug for use in young boys and then not sufficiently warning patients that the side effects for some included the possibility they would grow breasts.

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TAMPA — Donna Brown of Jacksonville started smoking cigarettes in high school and continued for 47 years, even after peripheral vascular disease forced amputation of both legs.

She tried to quit but couldn't.

This week, a Tampa jury decided tobacco giant Philip Morris USA owes the 64-year-old woman nearly $17.3 million for causing her disease and for hiding facts about the perils and addictive nature of cigarettes.

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