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Family awarded $1.6M

July 24, 2008

A Superior Court jury awarded $1.6 million to the husband and children of a Pennsylvania woman who died in 2003 after being prescribed the wrong heart medication.

Sandra D. Koch was prescribed 80 milligrams of Sotalol, which keeps the heart beating normally in people with certain rhythm disorders of the ventricles.
The drug was the wrong medication for someone on dialysis, said Timothy Lengkeek, the family’s attorney. Koch also was given four times the appropriate dosage for someone in that condition, he said.

“The drug is excreted from the body by the kidneys and if the kidneys don’t work and you are only getting dialysis every third day, the drug can build up in the body and cause a fatal heart arrhythmia, which is what she had kill her six days after she started the drug,” Lengkeek said. “There was overwhelming evidence that you don’t use this drug in this particular patient when there are other alternatives that were available that would have done the same thing.”

Read Article Delaware Online

Posted By Phoenix Accident Attorneys

Settlement to Ease Drug Costs for Some on Medicare

The Bush administration promised on Thursday to provide new protections for low-income Medicare beneficiaries to ensure they can get prescription drugs promptly, at minimal cost.

The promise came in the proposed settlement of a nationwide class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of hundreds of thousands of people who have had difficulty getting the medicines they need.

Under the 2003 Medicare law, more than six million people eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid are entitled to extra help with their drug costs. But in many cases, they could not get the assistance, so they did not receive the drugs they needed, or they experienced long delays.

Read Article New York Times

Posted By Phoenix Personal Injury and Accident Attorneys