Op-Ed: Victims of pharmacy mistakes have little recourse
From the article:
In December, my 4-year-old Labrador retriever was prescribed a medication to help with a condition related to her cancer. The pharmacist at a West Chester, Pa., Rite Aid mistakenly filled the medication at three times the prescribed dose, putting my dog’s life in danger. Fortunately, she recovered from the overdose after two nights at the emergency veterinarian.
Many states do not require pharmacies to report errors, and few do so voluntarily. While patients can report mistakes to state pharmacy boards, punishments are often light or nonexistent. In the absence of a legal judgment against it, a pharmacy is not required to reimburse a victim for damages incurred because of an error.
Even when a pharmacy does agree to pay for its mistake, it often requires the victim to agree to non-negotiable settlement terms. In my case, Rite Aid offered a settlement that included a clause forbidding me from ever talking about the incident. When the company rejected my request to remove the clause and refused to pay the veterinary bill without my agreement to it, I effectively paid $866 for the right to tell my story here.
From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush_money
Hush money is a slang term for a form of bribery, in which one person or party offers another an attractive sum of money or other enticement, in exchange for remaining silent about some illegal, stigmatic, or shameful behavior, action, or other fact about the person or party who has made the offer.[1]
The person or party who presents the hush money may be attempting to avoid criminal prosecution, a lawsuit (as sometimes in the case of an out-of-court settlement), a leak of information to the news media, or silence about a stigmatic issue within one’s own community. The information being covered up may include illegal activity, such as drug dealing, or some personal secret, such as an extramarital affair. In some cases, a government agency may be involved in the offer of hush money in order to protect the agency’s employees, politicians and their appointees, or a national government in its standing among other nations in the world. It is usually given under the table.
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Filed under: General Problems
From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush_money
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