Showing posts with label New York. Show all posts

Showing posts with label New York. Show all posts

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Merck agrees to proposed $27.7 mln settlement over Fosamax lawsuits

Many injured workers have been prescribed Fosamax for treatment of their conditions. Today's post was shared by FairWarning and comes from www.reuters.com

By Nate Raymond and Jessica Dye
NEW YORK Dec 9 (Reuters) - Merck & Co Inc said on Monday that it was prepared to pay $27.7 million to settle lawsuits by hundreds of people who sued the company over allegations that its osteoporosis drug Fosamax caused bones in the jaw to deteriorate.
Lawyers for Merck and plaintiffs disclosed the proposed settlement at a court hearing in New York to resolve 1,140 lawsuits pending in federal and state courts. Any settlement would need to be approved by a judge.
Merck, which confirmed the agreement later on Monday, said the accord requires a 100 percent participation rate and evidence that the claimants satisfy eligibility requirements. The deal covers about 1,200 people, the company said.
"We hope to bring this to a successful conclusion," Paul Strain, a lawyer for Merck, said at the hearing in U.S. District Court in Manhattan before Judge John Keenan, who has presided over federal litigation by plaintiffs claiming that they developed osteonecrosis of the jaw from taking Fosamax.
The condition is a disease that causes bones in the jaw to deteriorate or die.
The settlement would resolve a large portion of the 5,255 product liability cases facing Merck over Fosamax, a one-time blockbuster drug with $3 billion in sales in 2007.
Sales have declined since Fosamax lost patent protection in 2008. Through September, Merck had reported $421 million in Fosamax sales in 2013.
Of the lawsuits over Fosamax, about 860 of the cases were before...

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Tembow

Monday, December 2, 2013

Consumers, Employers Face New Round Of Health Coverage Challenges, Decisions

This news roundup is shared from kaiser.org

The Washington Post: Consumer Tips For Healthcare.gov Show Administration's Cautious Optimism
The Obama administration on Sunday reported vast improvement with the HealthCare.gov health-insurance portal that opened with extensive glitches in October, while acknowledging that the site still needs more work. One sign of ongoing problems came in the form of a blog entry and infographic that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius published on Huffington Post. Both items provide tips for consumers visiting the site, most notably by encouraging them to use it during off-peak hours — mornings, nights and weekends (Hicks, 12/2).
Kaiser Health News: With Three Weeks Left, Consumers Fear They May End Up Without Health Coverage On New Year’s Day
For people in the states with well-functioning insurance websites, such as California, New York and Kentucky, this appears to leave plenty of time. But making the deadline could be dicier for people in Arizona and the 35 other states where the federal website healthcare.gov is the path to coverage, as well as Oregon and Hawaii, which have struggled to get their sites functioning. On Sunday, the government reported progress in improving healthcare.gov, saying the site now allows more than 800,000 visits a day with the rate of timeouts or crashes reduced to below 1 percent. Officials said repairs continue (Rau, 12/2).
And for employers -
The Washington Post: New...

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Tembow

Monday, November 25, 2013

A Reference Guide for Controlling Health Hazards to Hospital Workers

The bad news is that hospital workers have extremely high injury rates compared to other occupations.

The good news is that there are many practical and proven ways to avoid these injuries. A supplemental issue of New Solutions: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy offers a new free report that describes over 30 health hazards to hospital workers and over 150 ways to avoid them.

In Controlling Health Hazards to Hospital Workers: A Reference Guide, specialists in occupational medicine from the United States and India describe ways to control everything from anesthetic gases to X-rays.

Hazards addressed include lifting and other ergonomic hazards, communicable diseases, hazardous drugs, chemicals, radiation, violence, stress and shift work. The researchers have summarized the literature on controlling these hazards by engineering means such as ventilation, shielding, automation, and administrative changes in procedures.

Each section describes the hazard, the literature on controls and internet resources where the reader can find more information. There are also general tips about identifying hazards and setting priorities.

The Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the New York State Nurses Association have made this supplemental issue of New Solutions (Baywood Publishing) available for free in order to reach healthcare professionals and hospital workers around the world. “It will be great for hospitals to have all this information in one resource guide,” said Professor Somashekhar Nimbalkar, one of the authors. “We will be sure to send it around to every hospital in India.”

The report, Controlling Health Hazards to Hospital Workers: A Reference Guide, New Solutions, Vol. 23, Supplement, 2013 can be freely downloaded at: http://baywood.metapress.com/link.asp?id=j676v4ul5026

The report will also be posted on the web site of the New York State Nurses Association at www.nysna.org/HealthHazards.pdf
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Jon L. Gelman of Wayne NJ is the author NJ Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thompson) and co-author of the national treatise, Modern Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thompson). For over 4 decades the Law Offices of Jon L Gelman 1.973.696.7900 jon@gelmans.com have been representing injured workers and their families who have suffered occupational accidents and illnesses.

Tembow

Macy’s Joining Wal-Mart on Thanksgiving Energizes Labor

Macy’s Inc. (M), whose annual Manhattan Parade is a cherished Thanksgiving tradition for millions, is starting a new holiday ritual: It’s asking its employees to show up for work.

Pressured by competition, a shorter shopping season and lackluster consumer spending, at least a dozen U.S. mega-retailers are opening for the first time on Thanksgiving Day,such as Macy’s, or opening earlier that day than in previous years. They are following Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT), the largest U.S.employer, which has been open for business on Thanksgiving for more than 25 years.

“Another holiday bites the dust in favor of retailers,”Candace Corlett, president of New York consulting firm WSL Strategic Retail, said in a Nov. 12 phone interview. “Our Culture now is to shop, and to get the best deals. Thanksgiving As a day of rest was another culture, another time, not today.”

The expansion of hours will take more than a million employees away from their families during the holiday. Organized Labor has been encouraging low-wage employees to join unions foryears to stem membership losses, and now wants to use the Thanksgiving hours to encourage workers to band together to improve working conditions.

“It plays into the larger themes that we’ve been pushing around low-wage workers who don’t have a lot of job security,”Amaya Smith, a spokeswoman for the AFL-CIO, said in an interview. “Thanksgiving, Black Friday is one example of one holiday...

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Tembow

Friday, November 22, 2013

“Scientists Who Help Asbestos Industry Sell Asbestos” by Kathleen Ruff

Today's post was shared by Ban Asbestos Network and comes from www.gban.net

Kathleen Ruff

Kathleen Ruff

Scientists who help asbestos industry sell asbestosThe asbestos industry has money. But money cannot buy scientific credibility
Kathleen Ruff, RightOnCanada.ca, November 21, 2013
The asbestos industry will be holding a conference in New Delhi, India on December 3 & 4 to promote use of asbestos in India. The International Chrysotile Association (ICA), an organisation financed by the asbestos industry and which promotes the industry’s interests, is organizing the conference.
The ICA has now put on its website a list of its speakers and summaries of their pro-asbestos presentations.
The purpose of the conference and of the ICA is to promote continued use of chrysotile asbestos, particularly in India, the biggest importer of asbestos in the world. Scientists and health experts around the world have condemned the asbestos industry and its allies for disseminating deadly, deceptive misinformation that will cause disease and loss of life.
Many of the speakers have been paid by the asbestos industry for years to take part in activities and events to promote use of chrysotile asbestos, particularly in developing countries. They form a small, notorious group of asbestos industry allies.
David Bernstein, for example, has received millions of dollars from asbestos lobby organisations for research on rats which, according to Bernstein, shows that rats positively enjoy being exposed to chrysotile asbestos. A New York court recently concluded...

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Jon L. Gelman of Wayne NJ is the author NJ Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thompson) and co-author of the national treatise, Modern Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thompson). For over 4 decades the Law Offices of Jon L Gelman 1.973.696.7900 jon@gelmans.com have been representing injured workers and their families who have suffered occupational accidents and illnesses.

Tembow

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Drug overdose deaths have quadrupled since 1980

The Workers' Compensation system is embroiled in a debate over use of pain medications. As I noted before, the problem of prescription pain medication and the abuse of medical prescribers, Is not limited to Worker's Compensation alone. The problem is systemic in the medical delivery system throughout the United States and it is foolish to think that it is only an exclusive issue two of Worker's Compensation claims. What is actually occurring, is that the insurance carriers and employers in Worker's Compensation, are utilizing this issue to reduce the delivery of medical benefits at the cost of damaging the very Basic requirements of a Worker's Compensation system. Today's post was shared by RWJF PublicHealth and comes from knowmore.washingtonpost.com

Drug overdose deaths have quadrupled since 1980

Drug overdose deaths have quadrupled since 1980

Since 1980, the number of us who die of drug overdoses has quadrupled. Most of these deaths now result from prescription drugs, especially painkillers. “The dichotomy between good drugs prescribed by doctors and bad drugs sold on the street is just bad science,” one doctor told The New York Times a couple of years back.
The really upsetting maps above show this change over the decade that ended in 2009. Appalachia and New Mexico, as popular culture would lead you to expect, were particularly bad areas for drug fatalities fifteen years ago, but now, the problem is clearly a national one. “What other people had been saying was that this was predominantly a rural problem of drug poisoning,” Lauren Rossen, one of the people who put together this analysis, told me. “We were somewhat surprised to find that drug poisoning death rates were actually highest in metropolitan areas.” Exceptions are the state of New York and a narrow band running through the center of the contiguous states, from North Dakota to Texas.
Click “Know More” to read more about this troubling trend.

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Tembow

Monday, November 11, 2013

Exhausted Workers Recall Minimal Efforts to Enforce a Minimum Wage Law

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.nytimes.com

Two weeks ago, Pin Zhu Zheng, who says she worked 69 hours a week behind a steam table at a Chinatown restaurant on Centre Street, presented herself at a New York State office to report what seemed to be flagrant lawbreaking by her former bosses.

“The first day of the month, they pay $1,500 cash,” Ms. Zheng, 55, said in an interview on Thursday.

“Everyone got the same.”

That works out to about $5 an hour for a six-day workweek that ran from 9:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.; the law requires a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour for the first 40 hours a week. After that, workers must be paid time and a half, or a minimum of $10.88 an hour.

“The Labor Department person told me that I had to wait a year for the follow-up,” Ms. Zheng said through a translator.

But what good is a minimum wage law if it takes forever to enforce it? Complaints with the State Labor Department about wage and hour violations were stacked 14,000 high at the end of July, according to documents obtained by the Urban Justice Center through a freedom of information request.

In May 2012, the records showed, 44 percent of the cases had been open for more than a year, said David Colodny, a lawyer with the center.

Carlos Rodriguez, 28, said he made $4.40 an hour in a pizza franchise on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, cutting vegetables, cleaning, unloading trucks by day and making deliveries at night. “We paid for the uniform, the hat, the T-shirt, the pants, the shoes,” Mr....

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Tembow

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Governor Cuomo Details Improvements to New York's Workers' Compensation System That Cut Costs to Employers by 26% for 2014

Improvements Will Save New York State Employers $800 Million Next Year and $300 Million Annually

Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today detailed a series of measures that reduce the cost to employers under the State’s workers’ compensation system by 26 percent in 2014, saving businesses and local governments $300 million in annual expenses. The Business Relief Act cuts the assessment to employers from 18.8 percent to 13.8 percent, the largest reduction since 1998, and provides a one-time workers’ compensation assessment savings to all self-insured employers of approximately $500 million.

“The improvements in the workers’ compensation system will deliver major savings for businesses across the state, giving them the opportunity to use that extra money to make investments and create jobs in their communities,” Governor Cuomo said. “With the cost reductions in the workers’ compensation system, we are saving New York employers $800 million in 2013 and $300 million for each year moving forward – a tremendous savings that will be felt immediately by businesses, municipalities and school districts statewide. As we continue to make state government more efficient and take actions to make doing business in New York easier, we are also spearheading a comprehensive review of the current workers’ compensation system so that we can continue to find ways to deliver for our employers.”

Signed by the Governor as part of the 2013-14 budget, the Business Relief Act achieves $800 million in savings by reducing the cost to operate the workers’ compensation system, otherwise known as assessments, in two ways. Closing the Re-Opened Case Fund initially saves all New York State employers a $300 million annual assessment. In recent years, the cost of the Re-Opened Case Fund has grown exponentially while failing to serve its originally intended purpose. Closing the fund also reduces unnecessary litigation in the workers’ compensation system, another cost savings for employers.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

Six Retailers Announce Recall of Buckyballs and Buckycubes High-Powered Magnet Sets Due to Ingestion Hazard

Today's post was shared by U.S. CPSC and comes from www.cpsc.gov

Buckycubes sets

Buckycubes sets

Recall Details

Description

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), in cooperation with six retailers, is announcing the voluntary recall of all Buckyballs and Buckycubes high-powered magnet sets sold by these companies. CPSC continues to warn that these products contain defects in the design, warnings and instructions, which pose a substantial risk of injury and death to children and teenagers.

Imported by Maxfield & Oberton LLC, of New York, N.Y., Buckyballs and Buckycubes consist of sets of numerous, small, high-powered magnets. These sets vary in the number of magnets included and come in a variety of colors. Individual magnets in the set are about 5 millimeters in diameter. Individual magnets in Buckyballs are spherical and individual magnets in Buckycubes are cube-shaped.

About three million sets of Buckyballs and Buckycubes have been sold in U.S. retail stores nationwide and online since 2010 for between $5 and $100.

Consumers should take the high-powered magnet sets and all associated individual magnets away from children and teenagers and contact the retailer from which they purchased the product to obtain instructions for their remedy:

Barnes & Noble, toll-free at (855) 592-2993 or online at www.barnesandnoble.com and click on “Product Recalls”

Bed Bath & Beyond, toll-free at (800) 462-3966 or online at ...

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Tembow

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Lousy Medicaid Arguments

Having technology that works is critical for operations and public confidence. Whether it be the PA court system or insurance exchanges, that need to work the first time around.Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.nytimes.com

For now, the big news about Obamacare is the debacle of HealthCare.gov, the Web portal through which Americans are supposed to buy insurance on the new health care exchanges. For now, at least, HealthCare.gov isn’t working for many users.

It’s important to realize, however, that this botch has nothing to do with the law’s substance, and will get fixed. After all, a number of states have successfully opened their own exchanges, doing for their residents exactly what the federal system is supposed to do everywhere else. Connecticut’s exchange is working fine, as is Kentucky’s. New York, after some early problems, seems to be getting there. So, a bit more slowly, does California.

In other words, the technical problems, while infuriating — heads should roll — will not, in the end, be the big story. The real threat remains the effort of conservative groups to sabotage reform, especially by blocking the expansion of Medicaid. This effort relies heavily on lobbying, lavishly bankrolled by the usual suspects, including the omnipresent Koch brothers. But it’s not just money: the right has also rolled out some really lousy arguments.

And I don’t just mean lousy as in “bad”; I also mean it in the original sense, “infested with lice.”

Before I get there, a word about something that, as far as we can tell, isn’t happening. Remember “rate shock”? A few months ago it was all the rage in...

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Tembow

Kansas SC suspends former AG’s law license indefinitely | Legal Newsline

Today's post was shared by Legal Newsline and comes from legalnewsline.com

The Kansas Supreme Court has suspended former state Attorney General Phill Kline’s law license indefinitely.
The high court released its decision Friday.
Kline
“As fully detailed below, after reviewing each instance of misconduct found by the panel, we find clear and convincing evidence that Kline committed 11 (Kansas Rules of Professional Conduct) violations,” according to the court’s per curiam opinion.
“In assessing discipline, we have considered the facts and circumstances of each violation; the ethical duties violated by Kline to the public, the legal system, and the legal profession; the knowing nature of his misconduct; the injury that resulted from the misconduct; the existence of aggravating and mitigating factors; and the applicable advisory American Bar Association Standards for imposing discipline.
“Ultimately, after applying that framework, we reject the Disciplinary Administrator’s suggestion of disbarment and conclude Kline’s misconduct warrants indefinite suspension, the discipline recommended by the panel.”
In October 2011, a panel for the Kansas Board for Discipline of Attorneys recommended that Kline should have his state law license suspended indefinitely.
Kline served as the state’s top lawyer from 2003 to 2007, and as Johnson County District Attorney from 2007 to 2009.
The three-member panel pointed to Kline’s actions during investigations of abortion...

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Tembow

Monday, October 21, 2013

Computer woes plague Pa. worker comp system

Today's post was shared from philly.com.

New software was designed to modernize the process of filing claims. Instead, the opposite has happened, according to interviews with attorneys, judges and others who use the system.

The glitches range from being unable to upload claims or other supporting legal documents into the system to having court paperwork disappear.

The result: Injured workers and their lawyers have been unable to get hearings, creating a backlog of cases at the Labor and Industry Department's Bureau of Workers' Compensation.

Attorneys for workers, employers and insurance companies are, in some cases, not getting notified of decisions in their cases. And judges and their staff have even been unable to upload critical documents into the system.

"The intent was good, but the delivery has failed," said Philadelphia attorney Leonard A. Cohen, who represents injured workers and who is on a steering committee working with the state to oversee the implementation of the system. "We are all in favor of hanging in here. But in the meantime, the [new software] is causing the system to almost come to a halt."

The new system, designed by New York-based Deloitte Consulting LLC, went live on September 9 and the problems started immediately.

Cohen said he has filed 20 petitions on behalf of clients seeking workers' compensation since early September, and not one has been assigned to a...

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Tembow

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Too Much Temptation To Do the Wrong Thing

The business of workers' compensation in New York, and the economic tension it generates, is the focus of a commentary by the publisher of Work Comp Central, David Depaolo. Today's post was shared by WorkCompCentral and comes from daviddepaolo.blogspot.com

The problem with workers' compensation being funded and managed by private interests is that there is simply too much temptation to do the wrong things for the wrong reasons - usually those reasons involve profiting at the expense of everyone else.

And so it seems in New York where an associate attorney in the State Workers' Compensation Board General Counsel's Office said in an affidavit filed in New York Supreme Court Friday that improper cost-shifting by the state's workers' compensation carriers has caused the liabilities of the state's Reopened Case Fund to "spiral exponentially," of course at the expense of employers.

After the historical reform of New York's system by then Gov. Eliot Spitzer, that imposed the state's first duration caps on permanent partial disability benefits, carriers began settling the indemnity portion of claims, leaving medical treatment open.

Three years after the indemnity payments run out, carriers can then file claims with the fund providing medical evidence that the workers' condition has changed, thereby shifting the cost of medical care for injured workers over to the Fund.

The lawsuit in which the affidavit was filed was initiated by Liberty Mutual Insurance Co. and 19 of its sister insurers to block a section of Gov. Andrew Cuomo's 2013-2014 budget the close the fund on Jan. 1, 2014.

Coumo made closing the fund part of the "Business Relief Act" included in his $141.3 billion budget and predicted that closing the fund will save New York...

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Tembow

Friday, October 11, 2013

Raising the mandatory judicial retirement age to 80

Today's post was shared by Legal Newsline and comes from legalnewsline.com

The New York City Bar Association says it supports a proposal on the state’s Nov. 5 ballot to amend the New York Constitution to raise the mandatory retirement age to 80 for state Court of Appeals judges and Supreme Court justices.
The state constitution currently requires all state judges to retire at age 70.
However, judges of the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, and justices of the state’s main trial court, the Supreme Court, may serve for up to six years after retirement so long as court administrators certify every two years that the judge’s services are necessary to expedite the business of the court, and he or she is mentally and physically able and competent to perform the full duties of the office.
“The City Bar supports Proposal 6, consistent with our longstanding position that the mandatory judicial retirement age, which was enacted in 1869, is outdated,” the bar association said in a statement Monday.
“Many individuals who reach the age of 70 have a substantial number of productive years ahead of them. Many states and the federal judiciary permit judges to serve past the age of 70, and New York should as well.”
The association argues that raising the retirement age would ease a strained court system — in particular, permit the transfer of Supreme Court justices to the state’s overburdened family courts.
In Pennsylvania, three groups of judges sued over...

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Tembow

Saturday, October 5, 2013

New York Second in Nation for Questionable Workers’ Compensation Claims

New York State is second in the nation, only behind California, for questionable workers’ compensation insurance claims. The Empire State jumped to the second place in 2012 from fifth in 2011, the New York Insurance Association noted.

“Workers compensation insurance fraud is a serious problem in New York,” Ellen Melchionni, president of the New York Insurance Association, said. “Fraud drives up workers compensation rates. The state and insurance industry need to remain vigilant in cracking down on those looking to cheat the system.”

The National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) analysis shows that the number of New York’s questionable claims reported in 2012 was more than double the questionable claims reported in 2011. There were 344 reported in 2012 versus 161 in 2011.

The NICB analysis also shows that in New York State, questionable claims in 2013 are on pace to exceed the 2012 figure. According to data available for the first half of 2013, 183 questionable claims were reported in the state between January and June.

“The growing rate of questionable workers compensation claims is alarming,” Melchionni said. “Fraud takes away from workers compensation serving its intended purpose of protecting injured workers.”
Source: The New York Insurance Association

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Tembow

Friday, October 4, 2013

New York City workers have high pesticide exposure

Workers in New York have something else to worry about now...pesticide exposure. Today's post was shared by FairWarning and comes from www.environmentalhealthnews.org

New York City residents are more highly exposed to two types of widely used pesticides than the U.S. average, according to a new study from the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

The findings “underscore the importance of considering pest and pesticide burdens in cities when formulating pesticide use regulations,” the researchers from the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene wrote in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.New York City residents are more highly exposed to two types of widely used pesticides than the U.S. average, according to a new study.

Population-based biomonitoring of exposure to organophosphate and pyrethroid pesticides in New York City. Environmental Health Perspectives http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/1206015/

Organophosphate metabolites were measured in the urine of 882 New Yorkers, while 1,452 residents were tested for pyrethroid metabolites. Some organophosphates have been banned in the United States in recent years, although many are still heavily used in agriculture. Pyrethroids are used indoors and outdoors in sprays and bug bombs to kill fleas, mosquitoes and other pests.

Among New Yorkers who were 20 to 59 years old in 2004, the highest exposed group had between two and six times more organophosphates in their urine...

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Tembow

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