These tips on safe winter driving from the Washington State Department of Transportation make for some appropriate “words to the wise,” as winter approaches for New Yorkers.  Please drive safely !

Fortunately, no serious injury here

Although this scene out of “A Christmas Story” did not result in the child being badly hurt, the various celebrations of the season’s holidays do present some very real risks.  Please see this pamphlet from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commision.  Please do stay safe and enjoy the Holiday Season.

As per The American Heritage® Medical Dictionary (Copyright © 2007, 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company) “Iatrogenic” has the following definition:

“i·at·ro·gen·ic (-tr-jnk) adj.  Induced in a patient by a physician’s activity, manner, or therapy.”

Several years ago, an article from JAMA found, “evidence from a few studies indicating that as many as 20% to 30% of patients receive contraindicated care.¹ In addition, with the release of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) report “To Err Is Human,”² millions of Americans learned, for the first time, that an estimated 44,000 to 98,000 among them die each year as a result of medical errors.”

Dennis Quaid, seeking to turn a personal near tragedy to a  public benefit, has undertaken a project to fight iatrogenic injuries and deaths.

We commend him for his good work and wish him great success.

The title of this post was the title of a recent article at NYTimes.com.  Here is the article.  Here is an excerpt:

… [W]hat’s your advice for pregnant women today on how best to protect themselves in a car?

The biggest thing is to wear your seat belt. Keep the lap belt by your legs and stay as far away from the steering wheel as you can. Some vehicles have a button to adjust the height of the brake and gas pedal so shorter people don’t have to sit so close to the steering wheel. And there are after-market pedal extenders. …Pedal extenders allow…a position further away from the steering wheel. It’s just three inches, but that’s a lot of distance in an accident.”

NYSTLA ( www.NYSTLA.org ) is the New York State Trial Lawyers Association.   At it’s web site NYSTLA states that the mission of the New York State Trial Lawyers is “To promote a safer and healthier society, to assure access to the civil justice system by those who are wrongfully injured and to advance representation of the public by ethical, well-trained lawyers.”

In furtherance of this mission, NYSTLA tirelessly supports the enactment of laws consistent with the mission statement above.  Recently, NYSTLA achieved a significant victory, for the benefit of people injured due to the fault of others.

Governor Signs Anti-Subrogation Law

NYSTLA achieved an extraordinary legislative victory when Governor Paterson signed into effect new General Obligations Law §5-335 on November 12, 2009. This law now bars any benefit provider, such as an HMO or private health insurer, from seeking any reimbursement or subrogation against any settling party to a personal injury or wrongful death action with respect to benefits it may have paid or is obligated to pay. The only exceptions are for claims for which there is a statutory right of reimbursement (e.g., Medicaid, Medicare, workers’ compensation) and subrogation claims to recover excess no-fault benefits.

This new law directly overrules two problematic Court of Appeals decisions, Teichman v. Community Hosp. Of Western Suffolk, 87 N.Y.2d 514 (1996), and Fasso v. Doerr, 12 N.Y.3d 80 (2009), to the extent they recognized non-statutory rights for reimbursement or subrogation against a settling party.

Moreover, this law takes effect immediately and applies both to future actions and all pending cases that have not settled or gone to trial as of today.

This law is a major victory in protecting our injured clients against the proliferation of unwarranted claims for windfalls by way of subrogation and reimbursement asserted by health insurers in recent years. It will significantly facilitate the prosecution of our cases and remove major obstacles to their resolution.

The bill also eliminates the exception under CPLR §4545 that barred a public employer sued by its employee from reducing a future lost earnings award by the amount of future pension benefits that plaintiff will receive (Iazzetti v. City of NY, 94 N.Y.2d 183, 701 N.Y.S.2d 332 [1999]). Under this new law, a public employer sued by its employee will now be entitled to the same collateral source setoff for future benefits as all other defendants are already entitled to receive. Even here, NYSTLA effectively rebuffed the City of New York’s overreaching attempts to have the law changed not only for new actions but also all those now pending. Thus, unlike the new GOL §5-335 above, this amendment to CPLR §4545 applies only to actions commenced on or after its effective date.

We salute the leaders and officers of NYSTLA who gave so much of their time and effort to arrive at this superb achievement. Those labors can especially be appreciated from the fact that the bill was passed with something as rare in Albany as it is in Washington – almost unanimous bipartisan support. The vote was 135-0 in the Assembly and 59-2 in the Senate.  (Text from www.NYSTLA.org)

As described in the New York Times recently, “On the evening of Dec. 2, 1984, methyl isocyanate gas escaped from the former Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, killing at least 3,000 people immediately. Thousands more are said to have since died or been injured as a result of the toxic cloud, although the exact death toll remains unclear.”

This tragedy was one of the most terrible industrial accidents in history.  ( I have read accounts that put the death toll in the tens of thousands.)

There is a cold hearted cynicism lurking in society that seeks to dismiss, minimize or even blame the victim of an accident who has the temerity to seek reasonable compensation for the harm suffered.

People who have been hurt deserve a fair hearing.  To marginalize their pain with a knee jerk reaction is a sure way to make a tragedy even worse.  To add, as the saying goes, insult to injury.

In the Op-Ed section of today’s NYTimes.com, Suketu Mehta describes the victims of Bhopal in language that echoes the sentiments of our clients.

The survivors of Bhopal want only to be treated as human beings — not victims, not greedy money-grabbers, just human beings who’ve gone through hell and are entitled to a measure of dignity. That includes concrete things like cleaning up the mess and providing health care for the sick, and also something more abstract but equally important — an acknowledgment that a wrong was done to them, and an apology, which Bhopalis have yet to receive.

The book The Life You Save: Nine Steps to Finding the Best Medical Care-and Avoiding the Worst was recently recommended to me.  There are strongly favorable reviews at Amazon.com.  Here is a site that goes into more detail about the book.

While the saying, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” may be old, it still rings true.   You may wish to consider this book as holiday gift for yourself and for others who you care about.

Several days ago, just before Thanksgiving, a gentleman who identified himself as a reporter for the New York Times called our office seeking comments on a noted event pertaining to an accident.  The ultimate headline of the article for which the comments were sought was, “Family Didn’t Sue After Baloon Fell, and Still Wouldn’t.”

The societal pulse the reporter was seeking to place a finger on was the “shock” some people (most ?) have that a (for the sake of discussion,) minimally injured person might choose not to sue the responsible parties.

After a discussion of several minutes the reporter summarized our conversation in the article as follows:

“Edward D. Friedman, a partner at the personal injury firm of Friedman & Simon, reached through 1-800-LAWYERS, said that although the sensational nature of the accident “would probably inflate” the value of a legal claim, he endorsed the Chamberlains’ approach.

“If they weren’t hurt, that’s the right thing to do,” he said. “To approach it otherwise is to have a sweepstakes mentality about it.”

During my conversation with the reporter, after I sought to expand my comment to say, “…a perverse sweepstakes mentality, etc.” the reporter told me that he “could not” change my initial comment.

I will take the opportunity to expand on my ideas a bit here.  We hate bogus claims.  We understand and wholeheartedly stand by the idea that frivolous cases must not be brought. (”Minimal” damage cases belong in the appropriate forum, such as Small Claims Court.)  We believe that a good faith belief in the merit of a case is the foundation of the civil justice system.

Too many bad players have contributed to the cynicism that is rampant in our society.  We take comfort in knowing that because our clients have been seriously or catastrophically injured through the bad conduct  of others, their cases are genuine and their causes are just.

One of New York’s Finest, Omar J. Edwards,  was killed in a tragic accident on May 28, 2009.

Many of the clients whom we serve live and work in the same New York City neighborhoods where Officer Edwards lived and worked.  His passing is a great loss for the community.

We appreciate the contributions this gentleman made, and extend our deepest sympathies and heartfelt condolences to his family, friends and colleagues.

Today’s online version of the Wall Street Journal, in it’s coverage of yesterday’s crash landing of a U.S. Airways jet in the Hudson River in New York, offered this:

“Lieutenant Thomas Mirante, a New York City firefighter, was among the rescuers who responded to the crash. He says he helped about 20 of the plane’s passengers get off a life raft at the West Side Midtown Ferry Terminal, which is located at the 40th Street pier in Manhattan. Lieutenant Mirante said the passengers were very cold but in pretty good spirits. “They were happy to be alive. They weren’t in too much shock because they were happy to be alive,” he said. Lieutenant Mirante said the passengers told him they heard a loud boom shortly after takeoff. They told him the pilot had managed to crash-land the plane on the water well, he said. After the plane came to a stop on the water, the life rafts deployed and the passengers got into them. He said they were soaked from the waist down when he helped them out of their life raft.”

Wars, terrorism and financial upheaval have filled the papers and digital media with an abundance of bad news over the past few months.  Here at the RealAccidentCases.com/blog we are used to seeing the tragic aftermath of accidents and injuries on a daily basis.

It is deeply moving to witness an event of this magnitude, a plane crash into frigid water, with the wonderful outcome of everyone surviving the crash and rescue.  We are delighted and grateful to know that all are safe.