Current Events

A Collierville man has been awarded more than $140 million in a lawsuit against the makers of a testosterone drug that he says caused him to have a heart attack.

A federal court jury in Chicago handed down the verdict in favor of Jeffrey Konrad on Thursday after several weeks of testimony in which his lawyers argued that Chicago-based AbbVie Inc. misrepresented the risks of its drug known as AndroGel.

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The billions of dollars that Medicare has spent on recalled or defective medical devices are a “significant cause for concern,” yet the government lacks a reliable way to track such spending a decade after it emerged as a sore point, auditors concluded this week.

The U.S. Health and Human Services inspector general’s office issued a report Monday concluding that Medicare claim forms lack information that would let the government track expenses including $1.5 billion spent on thousands of surgeries for heart devices that were recalled or failed earlier than expected.
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to wade into a circuit split over whether plaintiffs suing for age discrimination or retaliation can reap damages for pain and suffering.

The court denied certiorari to Susan Vaughan, a former nurse supervisor at Anderson Regional Medical Center in Mississippi who had argued that amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act passed in 1977 expanded the damages available under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.

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One of the largest distributors of pharmaceuticals in the United States, the Valley Forge-headquartered AmerisourceBergen Corp., will pay $260 million in penalties after pleading guilty in a subsidiary’s scheme that put the health of thousands of cancer patients at risk.

AmerisourceBergen Specialty Group operated divisions in Alabama — Medical Initiatives Inc. and Oncology Supply Co. — that were not registered with the Food and Drug Administration.
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Liberal U.S. Supreme Court justices on Monday defended the right of workers to bring class-action claims against companies but their conservative counterparts who are in the majority sounded skeptical in the biggest business case of the court’s new term.

A win for employers would give the green-light to an already growing trend in which companies require workers to sign arbitration agreements waiving their right to bring class-action claims either in court or before private arbitrators.

The development was announced on Wednesday via a Wall Street Journal op-ed penned by interim CEO Paulino do Rego Barros Jr. He took the reins at Equifax on Tuesday, replacing Richard Smith, who oversaw the company during a massive data breach that compromised the personal information of as many as 143 million people.
In the wake of the scandal, affected customers have been advised to implement credit freezes. The move aims to block anyone from opening new accounts in your name.

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(Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department has brought new charges over a scheme that it says enabled Tenet Healthcare Corp to fraudulently bill state Medicaid programs for $400 million, according to an indictment made public on Wednesday.

William Moore, the ex-chief executive of Atlanta Medical Center Inc, which had been operated by Tenet; and Edmundo Cota, the ex-head of a clinic operator that provided prenatal care to Hispanic women, were charged in an indictment filed in Atlanta federal court.

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Barry J. Cadden, owner of the now-defunct Framingham compounding pharmacy that was responsible for a deadly meningitis outbreak five years ago, should pay $73.7 million in restitution to the victims, federal prosecutors say.

Cadden was convicted in March of running a criminal enterprise — the New England Compounding Center — that mailed thousands of drugs contaminated with a mold that killed more than 60 people and sickened more than 700.

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A subsidiary for one of the country’s biggest wholesale drug companies admitted Wednesday in Brooklyn Federal Court to distributing misbranded drugs related to cancer treatment.

AmerisourceBergen Specialty Group pleaded guilty to the illegal distribution of misbranded drugs in connection to its nationwide shipments coming from an Alabama-based facility that wasn’t registered with the Food and Drug Administration.

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In its defense against thousands of lawsuits alleging talc can cause ovarian cancer, Johnson & Johnson has said science is on its side. But a new suit in St. Louis alleges the company has "blatantly lied" for decades about talc safety—and participated in a conspiracy to conceal the truth.

Filed in St. Louis circuit court on behalf of dozens of women who've suffered from ovarian cancer, the suit claims that numerous studies document a connection between talc and cancer.
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A collection of third-party insurance payers has filed a class-action lawsuit seeking $9.9 million from St. Jude Medical and parent company Abbott Laboratories, claiming St. Jude knew about a battery defect in its cardiac defibrillators nearly five years before issuing a recall.

Filed Sept.
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