While I am working in a community health clinic in a small west texas town,
I come across patients who cannot buy their insulin because they cannot afford the $5 for which it is being sold under the 340b program
and the millions of dollars awarded by juries all over the USA and how much money do personal injury lawyers are actually making on these people
This is just in USA forget about others in places like Syria ,Sudan and Somalia
The Cost of a Human Life, Statistically Speaking - The Globalist
https://www.theglobalist.com/the-cost-of-a-human-life-statistically-speaking/
https://www.theglobalist.com/the-cost-of-a-human-life-statistically-speaking/
Most recently, the law firm in 2018 obtained a $30 million settlement with AT&T and other companies for a worker who suffered catastrophic injuries in a nearly 50-foot fall from an improperly designed and maintained cell tower. (Read article)
In an earlier case, Kline & Specter won a $46.5 million jury verdict against a security company for the families of two women employees who were shot to death by a fired worker at the Kraft Foods plant in Northeast Philadelphia. The award was for compensatory and punitive damages. (See the Brown/Wilson Case)
In 2014, Shanin Specter and David Williams settled a wrongful death case involving a worker at a Philadelphia-area refinery for $10 million
And in the prior year, Kline & Specter obtained one of the largest settlements for an undocumented worker in negotiating a $5 million award for a man crushed to death by a collapsing excavation site. (Arana)
And in the prior year, Kline & Specter obtained one of the largest settlements for an undocumented worker in negotiating a $5 million award for a man crushed to death by a collapsing excavation site. (Arana)
Workplace injuries range from broken limbs to those involving more severe brain injuries and spinal cord injuries, even death. Among Kline & Specter's legal victories for working men and women are several with spectacular settlements or jury verdicts. They are:
- A lawsuit in which the firm won a $36.4 million settlement for a worker killed in an explosion at a Delaware oil refinery (see Davis/Motiva) The settlement, announced in September 2003, is considered the largest for a single-victim fatality ever reported in the United States.
- Two months later, in a case that spanned seven years and several appeals, an Allegheny County jury handed down a verdict of nearly $7.9 million for a Pittsburgh worker seriously injured in a fall from a forklift. (Drum)
- On Jan. 21, 2004, a jury in Luzerne County handed down a $19.1 million verdict for a woman who was struck and seriously injured by a van as she worked on a roadside construction job. (McManamon).
- In September 2008, Tom Kline won a $5.5 million jury verdict for the family of an 18-year-old man who was fatally shot while working as a parking lot attendant at Hahnemann University Hospital. The hospital had failed to improve safety and security after an armed robbery at the same booth only 12 days earlier. (Palmer)
In 2007, the firm won an $8 million settlement for a worker killed when he fell into a high-temperature pulping pit at a Manayunk paper mill. The case involved a lengthy dispute over which corporations were responsible. (Green.)
The firm also won two major cases for ironworkers. In November 2006, a jury awarded $3 million to a Philadelphia ironworker who sustained neck and shoulder injuries in a fall down a stairwell after temporary lighting failed at a construction site. (See McCormick 1 | 2) In December 2006, Kline & Specter negotiated a $1.7 million settlement for a Lehigh County ironworker severely injured in a fall at a cold storage facility. (Broadbent.)
In an earlier case, the family of a man crushed to death in a crane accident settled a suit against the manufacturer, seller and installer of the crane's control system. The settlement, reached in November 2002, was for $4.4 million. (Yankosky).
A workplace injury case was among one of Kline & Specter’s first victories as the firm secured settlements totaling $1.25 million in 1995 for Demetrius Atwood, a Philadelphia hotel employee injured by a malfunctioning elevator.
That's the international standard most private and government-run health insurance plans worldwide use to determine whether to cover a new medical procedure. More simply, insurance companies calculate that to make a treatment worth its cost, it must guarantee one year of "quality life" for $50,000 or less. New research, however, would argue that that figure is far too low.
Stanford economists have demonstrated that the average value of a year of quality human life is actually closer to about $129,000. To get to that number, Stefanos Zenios and his colleagues at Stanford Graduate School of Business used kidney dialysis as a benchmark. Every year dialysis saves the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans who would otherwise die of renal failure while waiting for an organ transplant. It is also the one procedure that Medicare has covered unconditionally since 1972 despite rapid and sometimes expensive innovations in its administration. To tally the cost-effectiveness of such innovations Zenios and his colleagues ran a computer analysis of more than half a million patients who underwent dialysis, adding up costs and comparing that data to treatment outcomes. Considering both inflation and new technologies in dialysis, they arrived at $129,000 as a more appropriate threshold for deciding coverage. "That means that if Medicare paid an additional $129,000 to treat a group of patients, on average, group members would get one more quality-adjusted life year," Zenios says. Based on patient surveys, one "quality of life" year is defined as about two years of life on dialysis.
Zenios's conclusions arrive amidst mounting debate over whether Medicare, the U.S. government health plan for seniors, ought to use cost-effectiveness analysis in determining coverage of procedures. Nearly all other industrial nations — including Canada, Britain and the Netherlands — ration health care based on cost-effectiveness and the $50,000 threshold. Medicare, on the other hand, decides whether to pay for new technology based on whether a treatment is "medically necessary and appropriate." But as health care expenses rise and entitlement programs grow fiscally strapped — at least one part of Medicare is now expected to be bankrupt by 2019 — more and more academics have called for this approach to be reconsidered, and for cost to become a factor. Such a move would mean that "if the incremental cost of a new technology was more than the threshold," Zenios says, "then the recommendation would be that Medicare not cover that new technology."
Assigning a dollar figure to Medicare patients' lives may sound crass, but such valuations are routine in Americans' daily lives. Take, for example, the $500,000 death benefit the government pays families when a soldier is killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Or the cost calculations that for-profit health insurers make to determine how much coverage they'll give customers. In fact, at least some Americans seem at ease with allowing money to play a prominent role in health care decisions. In a 2007 survey of New Yorkers, 75% of participants felt "somewhat" to "very" comfortable with allowing cost to inform Medicare treatment decisions, once they understood how the system worked. "Americans understand and are prepared to engage the issues that arise when setting priorities and limits for their public programs," Marthe Gold, the City University of New York Medical School professor who conducted the study, wrote with colleagues this past fall in the journal Health Affairs.
The Stanford researchers caution that if Medicare fully adopted a cost-benefit analysis model, too many patients could be denied life-saving treatment. They return to the example of dialysis patients. Their study showed that for the sickest patients, the average cost of an additional quality-of-life year was much higher — $488,000. "It is difficult to justify the burden and expense of dialysis when persons have other serious health conditions such as, for example, advanced dementia or cancer," says co-author Glenn Chertow, a nephrology professor at the Stanford School of Medicine. "In these settings, dialysis is unlikely to provide any meaningful benefit." But with organs including kidneys for transplant so scarce, is it justifiable to deny these patients a chance to live through dialysis? It is a question, Zenios says, everyone should approach with trepidation. "What is the true value of a human life? That's what we're asking people," he adds. "I wouldn't pretend to know."
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