Posts Tagged ‘Consumer Safety’
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Wednesday, February 10th, 2010
For explanation purposes here, pharmaceutical companies have two types of costs, those involved in manufacturing and distribution and those involved in research and development.
When we clobber them with the costs of abusive lawsuits it must be added to the costs of manufacturing and distribution i.e. price to consumers. Otherwise they have to reduce assets in one or both of those categories. If they manufacture less so they can pay the outrageous punitive awards then the drugs we need become scarce. If they reduce research and development to send the funds to lawyers for outrageous punitive awards then people with diseases for which there currently are no medications or less effective medications must continue to do without.
Some medications have bad side effects. Wouldn’t we like drug companies to continue research to make more efficacious medications without the bad side effects.
If we force drug companies to hold prices constant but increase their total costs, something has to be reduced or they go out of business (or stop doing business in the USA).
I am referring to punitive damages not lawsuit awards to “make the patient whole”, costs to heal an injured person from a negative drug effect due to negligence by the manufacturer. New drugs go through years of research and testing all of which the documentation is sent to the Food and Drug Administration in order to get the drug approved for marketing. The long testing and development costs are very high ($millions) which is why only large companies can incur them.
So the major variable is excessive punitive damage awards. John Edwards, the one we see in the news everyday, made a fortune from abusive lawsuits. His clients were mothers of premature babies. Babies born too early have a high risk of birth defects. Edwards attributed these to medical malpractice rather than mother nature and because of emotional juries he made a fortune. His firm actually screened each case to make certain it fit the criteria to assure a winnable case. If you were a mother with a newborn and didn’t fit his criteria, too bad for you.
http://www.medicalprogresstoday.com/spotlight/spotlight_indarchive.php?id=1149
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tort_reform
When a mistake is made and identified before a product is marketed it should be corrected. If it is identified after being marketed corrective action should be taken immediately. We hear or read about product recalls all the time. If no action is taken but the problem has surfaced then negligence is involved.
When a person has an unforeseen negative side effect if it is due to insufficient testing the drug company and the FDA are responsible. Good luck going after the FDA. Pass on to the drug company the costs of fixing the patient. If the patient passed away then justly compensate those affected by the loss.
Jury awards of hundreds of millions of dollars are not justified and only serve to increase the prices of drugs and medical service to the rest of us.
In states where lawsuit abuse has been limited by legislation medical malpractice insurance premiums have been reduced and doctors have returned to practice in those states.
Politicians in Washington are reluctant to reduce lawsuit abuse since the law firms are major contributors to their campaigns.
http://www.examiner.com/a-1292440~Strongest_lawsuit_abuse_reform_opponents_in_Senate_received_the_most_Milberg_Weiss_cash.html
Remember it is either reduce artificial costs passed on to drug companies and malpractice insurance companies or reduce the drugs available and number doctors practicing.
http://www.tortreform.com/node/545
http://docisinblog.com/index.php/2009/07/27/texas-tort-reform/
There is no provision in the current health care bills for lawsuit abuse reform.
So it looks like Texas has solved its problem. No! A federal law will preempt existing state laws and put us right back where we were, fewer doctors and fewer drugs.
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, Consumer Safety, Election 2010, government control, Healthcare Availability, Houston, Houston Voters, national healthcare, socialized medicine
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Sunday, December 27th, 2009
Flint, Mich.
Michelle Berry runs a private day-care service from her home on the outskirts of this city, the birthplace of General Motors. “The Berry Patch,” as she calls the service, features overstuffed purple gorillas, giant cartoon murals, and a playroom covered in Astroturf. Her clients are mostly low-income parents who need child care to keep their jobs in a city that now has a 26% unemployment rate.
Ms. Berry owns her own business—yet the Michigan Department of Human Services claims she is a government employee and union member. The agency thus withholds union dues from the child-care subsidies it sends to her on behalf of her low-income clients. Those dues are funneled to a public-employee union that claims to represent her. The situation is crazy—and it’s happening elsewhere in the country.
A year ago in December, Ms. Berry and more than 40,000 other home-based day care providers statewide were suddenly informed they were members of Child Care Providers Together Michigan—a union created in 2006 by the United Auto Workers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The union had won a certification election conducted by mail under the auspices of the Michigan Employment Relations Commission. In that election only 6,000 day-care providers voted. The pro-labor vote turned out.
Many of the state’s other 34,000 day-care providers never even realized what was going on. Ms. Berry tells us she was “shocked” to find out she was suddenly in a union. The real dirty work, however, had been done when the state created an “employer” for the union to “organize” against.
Of course, Michigan’s independent day-care providers don’t work for anybody except the parents who were their customers. Nevertheless, because some of these parents qualified for public subsidies, the Child Care Providers “union” claimed the providers were “public employees.”
Full article
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, Consumer Safety, forced unionization, government control, personal responsibility, socialism
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Sunday, December 27th, 2009
DETROIT – They heard a pop that sounded like fireworks. They saw a glow of flame followed by a rush of smoke. And that was enough for passengers on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 to pounce.
From several seats away, Dutch tourist Jasper Schuringa says he jumped to extinguish a fire ignited by a quiet man who just moments before allegedly told passengers his stomach was upset and pulled a blanket over himself. Schuringa said his first thought wasn’t to signal a flight attendant or wait for an air marshal to break cover, but rather, “He’s trying to blow up the plane.”
“I basically reacted directly,” Schuringa said Saturday in an interview with CNN. “I didn’t think. I just jumped. I just went over there and tried to save the plane.”
Aviation safety experts once would have called Schuringa’s actions a mistake and cautioned passengers against fighting back during hijackings and other crises in the air. That was before the Sept. 11 attacks and the actions of passengers on United Flight 93, who learned while aloft about the hijacked jets that slammed earlier that day into New York’s World Trade Center.
They staged a cabin revolt against the al-Qaida terrorists who had taken control of their flight and died when their plane crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pa. But they succeeded in keeping the jet from destroying another building that day, and their story became legend.
“I don’t think people are going to sit back and let somebody kill them in the process of fulfilling their extremist agenda or whatever it happens to be,” said Dave Heffernan, who helps oversee self-defense training for commercial flight crews at Valenica Community College in Orlando, Fla. “People have talked about it. They’ve thought about it. They have a plan of action.”
On Saturday, a day after the failed attack on Northwest 253, federal prosecutors charged Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, a native of Nigeria, with trying to destroy the airliner with a device containing a high explosive attached to his body. They alleged that Abdulmutallab set off the device — sparking a fire instead of an explosion — as the flight from Amsterdam descended toward Detroit Metropolitan Airport.
MORE
Tags: Airlines Safety, Barack Obama, Congress, Consumer Safety, National Security
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Sunday, September 27th, 2009
Article in ScienceInsider by Sam Kean
For the first time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has publicly admitted that politics has trumped science. The agency acknowledged yesterday that it approved a device to help with knee-replacement surgeries—a device the agency’s own scientists said often failed—only after it received pressure from a cohort of Democratic congressmen from New Jersey, where the device’s manufacturer is located.
In a new report, FDA cited pressure from senators Robert Menendez and Frank R. Lautenberg and representatives Frank Pallone Jr. and Steven R. Rothman as a decisive factor in gaining approval: “The Director of FDA’s Office of Legislation described the pressure from the [Capitol] Hill as the most extreme he had seen…
Tags: Consumer Safety, economy, Healthcare
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
Friday, October 24th, 2008
so I went to the Wall St Journal and here it is. Click on blue heading for entire item and “Workforce Management” for more.
Are 401(k)s safe from congressional Democrats?
If you have a 401(k) or equivalent retirement plan, you’ve probably been watching nervously the past few weeks as your nest egg has shrunken owing to the current turmoil in the markets.
Well, it could be worse. But don’t take heart, for what we mean is it could get worse. The market turmoil has some politicians on Capitol Hill eyeing the end of the 401(k) as we know it. Workforce Management reports on a hearing of the House Education and Labor Committee earlier this month:
A plan by Teresa Ghilarducci, professor of economic-policy analysis at the New School for Social Research in New York, contains elements that are being considered. . . .
Under Ghilarducci’s plan, all workers would receive a $600 annual inflation-adjusted subsidy from the U.S. government but would be required to invest 5 percent of their pay into a guaranteed retirement account administered by the Social Security Administration. The money in turn would be invested in special government bonds that would pay 3 percent a year, adjusted for inflation.
The current system of providing tax breaks on 401(k) contributions and earnings would be eliminated.
“I want to stop the federal subsidy of 401(k)s,” Ghilarducci said in an interview. “401(k)s can continue to exist, but they won’t have the benefit of the subsidy of the tax break.”
Ghilarducci outlined her plan last year in a paper for the left-liberal Economic Policy Institute, in which she acknowledges that her plan would amount to a tax increase on workers making more than $75,000–considerably less than the $250,000 Barack Obama has said would be his tax-hike cutoff. In addition, workers would be able to pass on only half of their account balances to their heirs; presumably the government would seize the remaining half. (Under current law, 401(k) balances are fully heritable, although they are subject to the income tax.)
Sounds pretty unappealing, doesn’t it? But in her congressional testimony, Ghilarducci offered a sweetener:
Short-term I propose . . . that the Congress allow workers to swap out their 401(k) assets, perhaps at August levels, for a guaranteed retirement account–just a one-time swap. . . .
How would this work? You go back to your districts and meet up with a 55-year-old who had had $50,000 in his account last month and now has $40,000 in the account. He can swap out that $50,000, valued in August, for that guarantee of what would become, if he retires at 62, a $500 a month addition to Social Security.
A 55-year-old who lost 20% of his 401(k) because of the recent stock market decline was investing more aggressively than he should have, given his age. Ghilarducci proposes to reward this imprudence in exchange for dramatically limiting everyone’s ability to take risks (and enjoy the corresponding rewards) and for greatly increasing government control of Americans’ retirement funds.
If you want to vote against it you have until November 4.
Tags: Barack Obama, Consumer Safety, economy, goodbye 401K, say good bye to your nest egg, Sheila Jackson Lee, Social Security, Taxes
Posted in Houston, National Issues, Sheila Jackson Lee, The U.S. Government, Voices of the 18th Congressional District | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
You think my title doesn’t make sense or worse is insane. I have been listening to TV all day hearing that bankers are not going to be making loans. If banks don’t make loans they have no income. With no income they can’t pay bonuses to their management nor any actual necessary business expenses such as electricity and rent. They have to make loans. Their business is attracting deposits by paying interest to you to let your money sit at their bank. Then they lend it to others at a higher interest rate. The difference in the two interest rates provies their money for business expenses.
Back around the 1970’s banks needed money to lend. They didn’t want to be locked in to an above normal interest rate so they offered premiums. Literally you were offered bed sheets, coffee pots, towels etc to get you in there to open an account.
Political Cartoons by Steve Kelley
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
People didn’t trust banks. The Federal Reserve just just raised the insured level to $250,000 to get you to put your money in banks.
Bailout comments by Walter Williams
Who will get America back on its feet? Who will impose the socialism from which the Europeans and South Americans are struggling to rid themselves? European view of Socialism.
Thomas Sowell – The Real Obama Part II
A Summation of Birds of a Feather
Let’s work together to put John Faulk in office. We need to elect members of Congress with strong financial backgrounds instead of lawyers who put us in this situation like Sheila Jackson Lee.
Tags: balanced budget, Barack Obama, character counts, Consumer Safety, economy, government control, Mortgage Crisis, National Security, risky loans, Sheila Jackson Lee's pal Jefferson, socialism, Taxes
Posted in National Issues, Sheila Jackson Lee | No Comments »
Sunday, August 31st, 2008
Don’t we send them there and pay them to represent us. Sheila Jackson Lee constantly reminds us that she is on the Homeland Security Committee among others.
As Hurricane Gustav aims for the Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas coastlines we once again worry (if not panic) about the effects. Remember it wasn’t a direct hit from Hurricane Katrina that flooded New Orleans and caused the devastation it. It was the failure of the levees on Lake Ponchartrain. I remember on Sunday evening seeing Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco telling everyone that the hurricane passed over and everything was fine. They said they had contacted FEMA and told them officially the same. I also remember the next day the anxiety waiting to know if the levees would hold as the water in the lake rose from the drainage of rain water. They didn’t. So 24 hours after the hurricane passed over the damage began. Why?
Congress, the courts and other government bodies long before Katrina made decisions that the bugs, fish and wild life were more important than the people of New Orleans.
“As radical environmentalists continue to blame the ferocity of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation on President Bush’s ecological policies, a mainstream Louisiana media outlet inadvertently disclosed a shocking fact: Environmentalist activists were responsible for spiking a plan that may have saved New Orleans. Decades ago, the Green Left – pursuing its agenda of valuing wetlands and topographical “diversity” over human life – sued to prevent the Army Corps of Engineers from building floodgates that would have prevented significant flooding that resulted from Hurricane Katrina.”
And
Greens vs. Levees
”With all that has happened in the state, it’s understandable that the Louisiana chapter of the Sierra Club may not have updated its website. But when its members get around to it, they may want to change the wording of one item in particular. The site brags that the group is “working to keep the Atchafalaya Basin,” which adjoins the Mississippi River not far from New Orleans, “wet and wild.”
“These words may seem especially inappropriate after the breaking of the levee that caused the tragic events in New Orleans last week. But “wet and wild” has a larger significance in light of those events, and so does the group using the phrase. The national Sierra Club was one of several environmental groups who sued the Army Corps of Engineers to stop a 1996 plan to raise and fortify Mississippi River levees.
The Army Corps was planning to upgrade 303 miles of levees along the river in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas. This was needed, a Corps spokesman told the Baton Rouge, La., newspaper The Advocate, because “a failure could wreak catastrophic consequences on Louisiana and Mississippi which the states would be decades in overcoming, if they overcame them at all.” “
I heard on the TV today that since Katrina, the Army corps of Engineers has reinforced the levee bases and they are expected to hold. I believe them. I hope I am not wrong.
Tags: Consumer Safety, Environmental Issues, environmentalists, floods, government and the levees, hurricane, levees, National Security, New Orleans
Posted in Houston, National Issues, Sheila Jackson Lee, Voices of the 18th Congressional District | No Comments »
Saturday, August 30th, 2008
Thomas Sowell’s Random Thoughts
“Now that the Senator with the furthest left voting record in the Senate and the Senator with the third furthest left voting are the Democrats’ nominees for President and Vice President, there will be great expressions of indignation over being “negative” if anyone dares call them “liberals.” Actually, leftists would be more accurate. ”
I have been drafting another post but when I read this I had to share it with you. The guy is just so insightful and wise. Its a breath of fresh air.
Here’s more:
“Although you can block unwanted phone calls from commercial sources, you cannot block automated phone calls from politicians, which will be inundating us this election year. Apparently the courts think that the right of “free speech” includes the right to impose that speech on an unwilling audience. Maybe we need a new Constitutional Amendment, guaranteeing “freedom from speech.” ”
“There are countries in Europe that would love to have their unemployment rate fall to the 5.7 percent unemployment rate to which ours has risen. Yet those who seem to want us to imitate European economic and social policies never seem to want to consider the actual consequences of those policies. “Unacceptable” is one of the big weasel words of our time– almost always said when the person who says it has no intention of doing anything, and so is accepting what is called “unacceptable.”"
Let’s hope we can have change, too.
Tags: Change, Consumer Safety, economy, European economics, Hope, Sheila Jackson Lee, Taxes, unemployment rate
Posted in Houston, National Issues, Sheila Jackson Lee, Voices of the 18th Congressional District | No Comments »
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
Many Americans have been affected by food poison from fresh tomatoes this spring. It seems like there’s always another food contaminant we have to worry about, off our grocer’s shelves. The last big scare was spinach.
This year we decided to grow our own vegetables and I’m glad we did. We are currently pulling around 20lbs of fresh organically grown vegetables (including tomatoes) out of our garden every day.
This time the CDC (Center for Disease Control) and the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) have been involved and they seem to be no closer to finding the source (Florida or Mexico). Maybe the Federal Government doesn’t want to implicate either migrant farm works (mostly illegal aliens) or they don’t want to implicate lack of controls on the North American Free Trade Agreement if Mexico turns out to be the source.
On the other hand the FDA has repeatedly said they are understaffed and under funded. It seems like the safety of American food supply might come to the attention of NSA (National Security Agency) at some point. Our government officials finally decided to go with additional funding for the FDA, just last week. While they are pointing fingers, Americans are getting sick, restaurants are losing business, more people are growing their own gardens and the American consumer is growing more wary of products in our grocery stores, toy stores and more.
You can keep up with all the latest health, consumer and product safety information at “Government Direct” right here on John Faulk’s website:
Health
National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) News
Avian Influenza (Bird Flu)
Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) News
U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission – Recent Product Recalls
U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission – Recent Child-Related Product Recalls
U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission – Recent Household Product-Related Recalls
U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission – Recent Outdoor Related Recalls
U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission – Recent Sports & Recreation Related Recalls
CDC – Emerging Infectious Diseases Journal
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Press Releases
MedWatch Safety Alerts from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
CDC HIV – AIDS Prevention
Medicare and Medicaid Headlines
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – Recalls
Ken
Tags: CDC, consumer product safety, Consumer Safety, FDA, product recalls, salmonella tomatoes
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