According to an article posted at TampaBays10.com on May 31, 2008, Jamaal Miles of Pinellas Point Florida was driving west on the Tom Stuart Causeway Bridge in St. Petersburg Florida when he lost control of his car. As a result, his vehicle crossed the median and crashed into an eastbound automobile driven by Amanda Anderson of Seminole Florida. The bridge was apparently closed to all traffic for two hours after the accident. Miles, his passenger Fredrick Wade, Anderson, and her passenger Charles Mosley were all taken to St. Petersburg area hospitals.

According to the Pinellas County Sheriffs office, Miles was cited for failure to use due care, no valid driver's license, no proof of insurance, and not wearing his seat belt. If in fact it turns out that Miles did not have insurance, the others involved in the car accident will not be able to receive compensation for their injuries unless they have purchased Uninsured Underinsured Motorist Coverage (UM). Most people do not even know what UM coverage is or why they need it.

UM coverage is insurance coverage you buy to cover you when someone other than you causes the auto accident and that person either does not have insurance or does not have enough insurance to fully compensate you. Insurance companies rarely encourage you to buy this coverage because they cannot accurately predict the risk associated with a driver they do not know that may cause an accident you are in sometime in the future.

While UM coverage is a bad bet for the insurance company, it is a good idea for you. Some comentators have estimated that upwards of 25% to 33% of all drivers in Florida have no bodily injury insurance to compensate people when they cause an accident. In otherwards, if you are in a car accident caused by someone else, there is upwards of a 33% chance that person does not have insurance to adequatley compensate you. With odds like that, it is worth the extra money to purchase UM coverage to protect you.

Scott Distasio
St. Petersburg Auto Accident Lawyer

DISTASIO LAW FIRM
HELPING INJURED PEOPLE
OFFICES: TAMPA
1-888-595-0022

A Canadian study, "Correlates of Medication Error in Hospitals", published May 14, 2008 in Health Reports concluded that nurses that usually work overtime and nurses that perceive staffing and resources were inadequate were more likely to report that a patient had received the wrong drug or wrong dosage. The nurses that participated in the study also reported that hospital medication mistakes were more likely to occur when poor working relations with physicians, lack of support from co-workers, and low job security existed. The study analyzed interviews of 18,676 nurses in Canadian hospitals performed by the Canadian 2005 National Survey of the Work and Health of Nurses.

Other interesting findings include the fact that 19% of the nurses interviewed acknowledged that medication errors had occured "occasionally" or "frequently" to patients in their care the year before the survey. The complete study can be found at the following link:
http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/82-003-XIE/2008002/article/10565/findings-en.htm

Scott Distasio
Florida Wrong Drug Attorney

DISTASIO LAW FIRM
HELPING INJURED PEOPLE
OFFICES: TAMPA
1-888-595-0022

Tampa personal injury lawyer

According to an article and video by Tammie Fields posted on tampabays10.com, on May 20, 2008 Rafael Grau of Davenport Florida was arrested and charged with a scheme to defraud. He and Geraldo Larracuente, also of Davenport were allegedly staging fake auto accidents for money. All of the people involved in the staged auto accidents were allegedly treated at Providence Chiropractic located at 2727 Martin Luther King Boulevard in Tampa. Insurance companies were then charged for medical treatment that was apparently unnecessary and may not have even been performed.

Insurance fraud schemes like this one are disturbing for many reasons. The most obvious are the fact that it is dishonest, illegal, and just plain wrong. Furthermore, it drives up the cost of insurance for the rest of us. However, the increased cost of insurance is just the tip of the iceburg. The hidden costs to society created by such crimes can never really be measured.

For example, as people read about this crime it reinforces stereotypes about chropractic care that are often not true. There are many hardworking honest chiropractors that provide a legitimate service to their patients. Crimes such as this one make people question the integrity of the legitimate health care providers that are truely helping people recover from real auto accident injuries.

Staged car accidents also reinforce steretypes about car accident attorneys that are not true. Every profession has dishonesty. In recent years, politicians and corporate lobbyists have used the news media and events like this one to portray the entire profession of personal injury lawyers as criminals. The truth is that the overwhelming majority of auto accident lawyers are honest hard working professionals that are trying to hold wrongdoers accountable and help injured people get financial reimbursement for their losses.

Of course the biggest cost to society from crimes such as this one takes place because of the stereotype it reinforces regarding the types of people that make personal injury auto accident claims. Like the hard working health care professionals and lawyers that try to help them, the overwhelming majority of people that make auto accident personal injury claims are honest. They have been in real accidents and have received real injuries. Crimes such as this one, however, make the people that judge them sceptical. Insurance companies offer people injured in auto accidents less money than their claims are worth because the insurance company either does not believe the person is injured or, more likely, the insurance company knows its lawyers can use events like this one to convince a jury that the person is not injured.

If you doubt that insurance companies purposely take advantage of these stereotypes then ask yourself why they spend so much money on advertisements aimed at publicizing crimes like the one above. Every ligitimate study of the subject has demonstrated that the percentage of fake injury claims is so small it is statistically insignificant. Why then do we see television commercials of fraud investigators from certain insurance companies bosting about how many millions of dollars they have saved the company by catching people faking their injuries. It is certainly not done to convince the viewer to buy that companies insurance.

The real reason such advertising is done is to reinforce the stereotype. If you doubt what I am saying, go down to the courthouse and view most any auto accident personal injury trial. You will see a carefully orchestrated show put on by the defense lawyer to convince the jury the plaintiff was not hurt in the accident. The lawyer cannot direcly accuse the plaintiff of faking unless there is real evidence of it. That is very rare. Instead the defense lawyer uses questioning about the biases of the plaintiff's treating physicians; the plaintiff's work history; the physical activities of the plainfiff before the accident; and the plaintiff's ifestyle before the accident to imply the injuries are not real or were caused by one of these things. The overwelming majority of such cases end with the jury concluding the plaintiff did not receive a permenant injury in the accident even though they did.

Scott Distasio
Tampa Auto Accident Lawyer

DISTASIO LAW FIRM
HELPING INJURED PEOPLE
888-595-0022

Tampa personal injury lawyer

Kevin McCarty, Florida's Insurance Commissioner, has been locked in what seemed to be a never ending battle with Allstate Insurance Company to force the company to comply with his subpeona for documents. To read more you can review my previous post. The fight started last year when the state began looking into why insurance companies in Florida were asking for rate increases of close to 42%. As part of the investigation McCarty requested that Allstate turn over documents that would allow his office to independently assess the need for its requested increase. Although Allstate has turned over upwards of 550,000.00 pages of documents, Commissioner McCarty has concluded the documents produced were not all the documents he requested. As a result, on January 16, 2008, McCarty issued a ban on Allstate issuing new insurance policies in Florida until it fully complies with his request. Allstate has, up until now, successfully skirted both the production of the documents and the ban on writing new insurance policies.

Florida personal injury lawyers are all too familiar with Allstate's tactics. Allstate's strategy was the same strategy it often employs in personal injury lawsuits. It objected to producing documents on trade secret grounds; it produced massive volumes of documents that were not relevant to the inquiry; it claimed it had fully complied; it publically asserted it was being treated unfairly by the state; and it appealed the Insurance Commissioners right to obtain the additional documents and ban it from writing new policies. The First Disrict Court of Appeal placed a stay on enforcement until it decided Allstate"s Appeal. The affect of the stay was to allow Allstate to hold on to the documents and continue writing new insurance policies from the time it appealed in January until now.

On May 14, 2008, the First District Court of Appeals finally ruled on Allstate's Motion for Rehearing of its April 4, 2008 denial of Allstates Appeal. Based on the Court's ruling, it appears Allstate's luck finally ran out. First District Court of Appeals Judge Paul Hawkes wrote "Allstate's willful, indeed potentially criminal, failure to comply with its disclosure obligations has prevented OIR from adequately investigating its reasoned belief that Allstate is systematically defrauding its policyholders." Not only did the Court deny Allstate's request for a rehearing of its April 4, 2008 decision to side with the Insurance Commissioner, but it refused to certify the matter to the Florida Supreme Court as a matter of great public importance. The decision will make it very unlikely that Florida's highest Court will take up the matter.

As a result of the Courts decision, it appears Allstate has finally gotten the message and provided all of the requested documents. Insurance commissioner McCarty said in a statement today, May 17, 2008, that after the court's ruling, Allstate provided an affidavit certifying that it complied with Florida law by providing all documents requested by his office. "I have stayed the suspension of Allstate, and I have accepted its affidavit as evidence that they have completely and unconditionally complied with Florida law and with our requests for documents," McCarty said. "I also, though, have made it perfectly clear that failure to cooperate with necessary, ongoing requests from the office will result in an immediate resumption of the suspension."

The Office of Insurance Regulation will now comb through the records and complete its investigation. We will have to wait to see what the documents show regarding the legitimacy of the rate hike requests that started this process. However, at the very least, the process has demonstrated that the state of Florida seems to have an Insurance Commissioner that is willing to put his own self interest aside to do what is right for the people of Florida.

Scott Distasio
Tampa Personal Injury Lawyer

DISTASIO LAW FIRM
HELPING INJURED PEOPLE
OFFICES: TAMPA
1-888-595-0022

Tampa auto accident attorney

Florida pharmacy malpractice lawyers have been waiting on guidence from the appelate courts on whether nursing home consulting pharmacists can be held responsible for their negligence. Unfortunately, at least one appelate court recently concluded they could not. On April 4, 2008 Florida's Second District Court of Appeal held in The Estate of Norma J. Johnson v. Badger Acquisition of Tampa LLC, 2008 W.L. 899280 that a consultant pharmacist hired by a nursing home does not owe a legal duty to a nursing home resident when the conduct in question involved giving negligent advice to the nursing home and or treating physicians. Mrs. Johnson was recieving medicine while living in the nursing home that was prescirbed by her physician and administered by the nursing home nurses. The consultant pharmacist had a contract with the nursing home to review nursing home records, review medication and administration records, review drug regimen records of the patient, provide training and oversight, and establish procedures for the pharmacy. The consulting pharmacist gave no advice directly to the nursing home resident and had no authority to alter or discontinue a resident's pharmacy regimen. Instead, the contract and state law limited the consulting pharmacist to providing advice to the nursing home resident's treating physician and the nursing home itself. The court, therefore, concluded that the duty to the resident rested with the treating physician and the nursing home instead of the pharmacist.

The Badger case is a setback for nursing home residents because the consulting pharmacy setup in that case is standard throughout the industry in Florida. Physicians and nursing homes nursing home abuse will point to the consulting pharmacist by testifying that they relied on the advice of the consulting pharmacist and therefore should not be held responsible for the outcome. Since the consulting pharmacist cannot be sued by the nursing home resident for pharmacy malpractice, the physician and nursing homes may have an empty chair to point to at trial. Nursing Home Neglect Lawyers should respond aggressively to this argument with a Motion in Limine citing case law that holds that nursing homes have a non-delegable duty to provide appropriate care to their residents. See NME Props. Inc. v. Rudich, 840 So.2d 309, 312,13 (fla. 4th DCA 2003)(holding that one can contract away the doing of a task but cannot contract away the ultimate legal responsiblity for a task you are required by law to perform). Unfortunately, some judges may allow the argument and use the Rudich case to fashion a jury instruction.

Scott Distasio
Tampa nursing home abuse lawyer

DISTASIO LAW FIRM
HELPING INJURED PEOPLE
OFFICES: TAMPA
1-888-595-0022

Tampa Personal Injury Attorney

Holding a Nursing Home responsible for wrongdoing in the State of Florida has become a game of wading through multiple layers of corporate structure. Nursing Home Negligence Lawyers used to be able to focus their efforts on proving the negligent conduct of the nursing home. However, In the late 1990's Nursing Homes figured out that dividing up the various components of owning and operating a facility into seperate corporations could help them escape responsibility for their conduct. Often, one corporation will own the property; one corporation will hold the license and employ the staff; one corproation will employ the management personnel; and one corporation will employ the accounting, billing, and regulatory personnel. Each of these companies will be owned by yet another company which are all owned by one large out of state parent company. All of the profits of the facility are funneled out through the various corporations indirectly to the main parent company. The Nursing Home then takes the position that a neglected and abused Nursing Home resident can only sue the company that holds the license and employs the staff (the licensee). Of course, the licensee company will carry very little or no insurance and own no assets. Many times the law favors the nursing homes. Unfortunately, the system of shell corporations has become so complicated that the cost of litigating the issues has scared away many Nursing Home Abuse Lawyers.

During the recent legislative session, the Florida Legislature had the opportunity to address some of the problems associated with the Nursing Home corporate shell game. The legislature was considering a bill labeled "Nursing Home Transparency & Accountablity". The bill would have required nursing homes to indentify related companies during the licensing process as well as publically disclose all contracts between the related companies. Although the bill would not have eliminated the deceptive shell game, It would have made it easier for Nursing Home Personal Injury Attorneys to connect the dots. Unfortunately the bill died in committee. There does not appear to be a rational explanation as to why the Florida Legislature failed to pass this law.

Scott Distasio
Tampa Nursing Home Negligence Lawyer

Distasio Law Firm
Helping Injured People
Offices: Tampa
1-888-595-0022

Tampa Personal Injury Lawyer