PROTECT CONSUMER JUSTICE.ORG

The California Department of Public Health handed penalties to 14 hospitals for “noncompliance with licensing requirements [that] caused, or was likely to cause, serious injury or death to patients.”

A fire caused by the battery of a Volt that was involved in a crash test has raised fears that “green,” petroleum-free transportation options might come with safety concerns.

“The top 10 chains have a strategy of keeping labor costs low to increase profits,” said the lead researcher in a University of California, San Francisco, study. “They are not making quality a priority.”

A report from the non-profit watchdog group Texas Watch says “tort reform” there has changed the state’s legal system so that it “perverts the rule of law into an instrument for the moneyed and powerful, as well as divorces it from any concept of justice.”

In Howell v. Hamilton Meats & Provisions, the California Supreme Court ruled those who cause injuries, not those who were injured, will benefit from the reduced prices for medical care and services negotiated by the insurance company of the person who was injured.

Skilled Healthcare has leased out the operations of five Humboldt County, Calif., facilities. The maneuver means the facilities are no longer bound by an injunction to meet legally-required minimum staffing levels, but an attorney for plaintiffs in a recent class action says the new operators will be under scrutiny.

A neurosurgeon who has been sanctioned by the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice has left that state, which has no limits on compensation for injured patients, to practice in Texas, where physicians’ liability is capped. But his Texas medical record shows no evidence of the more than $3 million paid to settle malpractice claims against him in Minnesota, and he is not obligated to be supervised by another surgeon as he was in Minnesota.