As readers of the blog know, I am an attorney who represents patients who have been seriously injured due to medical neglect and incompetence. I have many friends who go on…and on…and on about the need to enact aggressive tort reform to protect the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries from “frivolous” lawsuits.
An article in the October 14 edition of the Wall Street Journal provides an adequate response to my friends’ prayers for tort reform. The article, “FDA Finds Heparin Maker Violations,” tells the story of how Scientific Protein Laboratories, LLC, (SPL) the maker of the blood thinner Heparin, received a complaint about contaminated batch of the drug in October of 2008 but failed to investigate the complaint for almost one year.
The story gets worse. Heparin was linked to more than 80 deaths and hundreds of serious reactions in patients in 2007 and 2008. In response, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declared the cause of the problem was contaminated imported Chinese heparin ingredient. SPL, the manufacturer of Heparin, received the complaint from a corporate customer AFTER the FDA issued its warning about contaminated heparin ingredients from China. It still took SPL a year to investigate the compliant it received.
DOES AMERICA REALLY NEED MORE TORT REFORM IN THE HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY ?