JPS considers changing salary incentives for top executives

December 11, 2008

JPS Health Network’s top executives would have to focus primarily on improving patient care and patient satisfaction, rather than on bolstering the hospital district’s bottom line, if they want to earn bonuses, according to a proposal that the board may vote on today.

Or bonuses could be scrapped altogether, in favor of salary increases tied to patient care improvements.

 

“We have to focus on things that are important to the patients,” JPS Board Chairman Steve Montgomery said. “There will be a lot of quality outcome measurements woven into the patient satisfaction and physician satisfaction benchmarks.” Montgomery said previous executive goals, called critical success factors, were too heavily based on financial performance, and many were too easy to achieve.

 

“They hit [those] out of the park,” he said. As a result, executives, such as former Chief Executive David Cecero, earned hefty bonuses. While JPS performed well financially and accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars in surpluses in recent years, patient satisfaction scores have suffered.

 

Read Article: Star-Telegram

 

Posted By: Phoenix DUI Attorney

Ground Zero Lawsuits Are to Begin in 2010

After years of wrangling, lawyers for New York City and for the thousands of ground zero workers suing the city have agreed to begin trials in the spring of 2010. The lawsuits claim that workers suffered illnesses as a result of their exposure to dust at the site, and most of the first cases to be heard will involve people with the most severe health claims.

 

Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of Federal District Court in Manhattan is expected to issue an order approving a case management plan that he proposed and that was agreed to after modifications. After a hearing on Wednesday, the lawyers said they were moving forward with 50 to 60 cases.

 

“The people who need relief the most will be at the front of the line, where they should be,” said Paul J. Napoli, who represents more than 9,000 of the workers.

Nearly 10,000 firefighters, police officers, construction workers and others have sued the city and its contractors, saying they suffered respiratory and other illnesses because they were not given breathing masks during the nine-month rescue and recovery operation after the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

 

Read Article: New York Times

 

Posted By: Phoenix DUI Attorney

Justices Hear Bias Case on Maternity, Pensions and Timing

The argument of an employment discrimination case at the Supreme Court on Wednesday was full of references to one of the court’s more controversial decisions in recent years — the 2007 ruling against Lilly M. Ledbetter. Ms. Ledbetter lost her case because she had discovered the disparity between her pay and that of her male colleagues too late.

 

The later effects of past discrimination, the court ruled last year in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, a 5-to-4 decision, do not restart the clock on the statute of limitations. President-elect Barack Obama has supported efforts to overturn that decision in Congress.

 

The case that was argued Wednesday, AT&T v. Hulteen, No. 07-543, raised broadly similar issues. Noreen Hulteen and three other women took pregnancy leaves from AT&T from 1968 to 1976. When the company calculated their pension benefits on their retirements decades later, it did not give them full credit for the leaves.

 

Read Article: New York Times

 

Posted By: Phoenix DUI Attorney

Mintz Levin lawsuit seeks relief for Katrina victims

Boston law firm Mintz Levin said it has filed a lawsuit against a federal agency over claims that Hurricane Katrina-related relief dollars were improperly diverted away from poorer residents of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

 

Specifically, the suit is on the behalf of the Mississippi State Conference NAACP, Gulf Coast Fair Housing Center, and several individual residents from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, said the firm, whose full name is Mintz Levin Cohn Ferris Glovsky and Popeo PC.

 

The suit was filed today against the US Department of Housing and Urban Development in the US District Court in Washington, D.C., Mintz Levin said. When Congress appropriated more than $5 billion in hurricane-relief aid to Mississippi, one requirement was that at least half of the funds would benefit low and moderate-income people, Mintz Levin said.

 

Read Article: Boston Globe

 

Posted By: Phoenix DUI Attorney

Family of officer killed in crash is awarded $8M

Four years after a highly decorated North Miami Beach police officer was killed in a car crash, his wife and three daughters were awarded $8.07 million by a Broward County jury.

 

Yvette Lorenzo and her three daughters were not in the car with the father, Officer Orestes ”Oreo” Lorenzo, when he swerved out of the way while driving west on Pines Boulevard in Pembroke Pines to avoid hitting a red Honda Civic that ran a stop sign.

Lorenzo’s car went straight into a drainage curb, tripping his vehicle and smashing it against a large royal palm tree. The father of three was ejected from the car. He died in the hospital seven days later.

 

It was July 2, 2004, when Natasha Russo, 18, drove her father’s new car past the stop sign on 180th Avenue. The jury awarded the compensatory damages — against the Florida Department of Transportation and William and Natasha Russo — at midnight Saturday.

The trial was closed to the public because of the flooding that closed the courthouse last week.

 

Read Article: Miami Herald

 

Posted By: Phoenix DUI Attorney

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