If the U.S. Supreme Court rules in favor of barring lawsuits against Food and Drug Administration-approved medications, pharmaceutical companies will be quite pleased. Earlier this year the Supreme Court reinterpreted a 1976 amendment that had originally been intended to protect the public against dangerous medical devices by requiring the FDA to review and approve such devices before they could be sold to the masses. The reinterpretation led the Supreme Court to bar lawsuits against FDA-approved medical devices. Now the Supreme Court may extend this ruling to FDA-approved drugs. If this happens, some tens of thousands of lawsuits will be dismissed, and the public will have no recourse or protection when harmed by pharmaceuticals.

Twenty-four states now have caps on the amount of noneconomic damages a plaintiff can get in medical malpractice cases. Why? Many feel such cases are often frivolous, that plaintiffs ask for more money than is reasonable, and that greedy lawyers are to blame for escalating damages. According to an article by David A. Hyman in Forbes Magazine, however, these caps are hurting more than helping–they are hurting those who truly cannot afford the economic consequences of negligently caused injuries.

Expanding on the blog post from August 25 about serious medical errors, also known as sentinel events or “never events,” MSNBC recently reported that hospitals in about half of the nation’s states have decided not to bill for such events. This is a sweeping change since February, when MSNBC reported that only about 11 states chose not to bill for egregious medical mistakes. Hospitals will follow guidelines to determine which medical errors should be exempt from billing, and these guidelines will vary from state to state.

Many of us have heard stories about botched surgeries during which medical instruments are left inside patients, but how many of us considered these stories to be urban legends? Sadly, such stories aren’t tall tales but often the truth. A recent story in the Salt Lake Tribune documented serious medical errors that took place in Utah hospitals in the twenty-first century. These “never events,” or sentinel events, as they are called, numbered some 219 from October 2001 to April 2007 and resulted in the deaths of nearly half. Among these errors were patients receiving the wrong blood type during transfusions, patients receiving the wrong type of medication, patients having the wrong type of surgery performed, and patients, specifically infants, being dropped.

Who could imagine that dental care could be hazardous enough to cause death? Though uncommon, apparently there have been enough patient deaths resulting from dental care to prompt the state of Washington’s Health Secretary to ask the state’s dental board, known as the Washington Dental Quality Assurance Commission, to launch an investigation.

The Seattle P-I newspaper first published a story on July 15, 2008, that investigated three patient deaths. The article asserted that the dental board’s investigations of these deaths were inadequate.