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October 6, 2008

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Scottsdale Pedestrian Accident/Wrongful Death Case

The City of Scottsdale is in the middle of a lawsuit, whereby a family is alleging that a city crosswalk was unsafe and partly responsible for the death of their family member. The city is looking at a settlement at the moment. East Valley Tribune has the story:

“City considers settlement in crosswalk death”
Ari Cohn, Tribune

After a car struck and killed arts enthusiast Richard Cohen as he crossed Drinkwater Boulevard next to the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts last year, his family sued the city, saying the heavily used crosswalk is unsafe.

Cohen, 81, who walked with a cane, was crossing Drinkwater at Second Street at 10:30 p.m. in February 2007 when the driver of a Jeep Cherokee hit him and drove away.

Cohen’s wife, Constance, who was with him when he was hit, claims the pedestrian signal is not long enough to allow slow walkers like the elderly or the disabled to make it across safely, according to the lawsuit, filed in November in Maricopa County Superior Court.

Read Full Article East Valley Tribune

Posted by Phoenix Divorce and Family Law Attorney

Parents sue center where physicist hanged herself

The parents of a Japanese physics phenomenon who killed herself at an institution near the University of Colorado two years ago are suing the health center, saying it was not watching the physicist closely enough.

Celebrated physics postdoctoral student Michi Nakata hanged herself with a noose she made from her hospital gown in 2006 at the Mapleton Center Behavioral Health Unit. Her parents say she was supposed to be under constant observation as one of the facility’s highest-risk suicide patients.

Kiyoshi and Yasuko Nakata are suing Boulder Community Hospital, which runs Mapleton Center, for wrongful death. The lawsuit alleges that the 30-year-old student from the Tokyo Institute of Technology should not have been left alone.

A spokesman for Boulder Community Hospital said he can’t comment on the lawsuit, which was filed last month. But spokesman Rich Sheehan said the physicist’s death has not been forgotten.

Read Article Denver Post

Posted By Phoenix Accident Injury Attorneys </a

Fraud is a hang-up for prepaid calling card market

Rosalba Posada can tick off a list of problems she has encountered trying to use prepaid calling cards to stay in touch with family back in Colombia.

There were the cards that didn’t deliver as many minutes as promised and the cards that charged extra fees to call a cellphone. There were the cards that offered several hundred minutes of calling time, but began deducting minutes if they were not all used in a single call. There was the card that had already expired when Posada tried to use it just a few months after buying it. And there was the card that simply didn’t work at all.

“Some of those prepaid calling cards are good for nothing,” said Posada, a high school registrar who lives in Pembroke Pines, Fla., and now uses Skype, a free Internet calling service, to talk with her family. “All they do is make some companies rich while we the customers have no say.”

Over the past decade, the prepaid calling card business has mushroomed into a $4 billion industry that has injected new competition into the market for international phone calls and provided a critical lifeline to connect immigrants with family and friends back home. The cards are sold in gas stations, newsstands, convenience stores, bodegas and groceries across the country.

Read Article USA Today

Posted By Phoenix Accident Injury Attorneys </a

Medicare

The federal government is now requiring that certain hospital mistakes are to be paid for by the doctor/hospital. Medicare will no longer make any payments in these situations. Now, doctors and hospitals aren’t just legally liable for in negligence to the family, but they also must pay their own costs for mistakes on Medicare patients. AZ Central has the latest:

“Hospitals to pay for own surgical mistakes”
by Ken Alltucker, The Arizona Republic

Hospitals will no longer be rewarded for leaving a sponge in a patient’s chest during heart surgery or accidentally infecting a patient during a weight-loss operation.

This month, the federal government rolled out a new program that withholds some payments from hospitals that want to bill Medicare for the costs of correcting their own mistakes.

Medicare, the government insurance program for the elderly and disabled, has named 10 hospital-acquired conditions that are “reasonably preventable” and should not end up costing the government money to put right. Some examples include a second surgery required to remove an object, such as a sponge or a medical tool, left in a patient during an initial surgery or improper catheter use that triggers a urinary-tract infection.

Read Full Article AZ Central

Posted by Phoenix Product Liability Attorney