| Volume 92 Number 3 |
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The People’s Lawyer’s Tip of the Day
If you are receiving emails that appear to be from PayPal, a bank, or a credit card company telling you about "a recent charge to your account," ignore them.
Do not click on any link to verify your account or dispute the charge. If you want to check with your credit card company, the phone number is on your card. If you think the notice may be real, wait until you receive your credit card bill and then dispute it. These are likely scams designed to get your private information.
For more general information about the law, check out my website.
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J&J to Pay $2.2B to Settle Federal Charges
Johnson & Johnson will pay $2.2 billion to settle federal charges over improper marketing of antipsychotic drug Risperdal and other medications.
According to civil and criminal claims, Johnson & Johnson marketed medications for off-label uses and paid kickbacks. The $2.2 billion includes $485 million in criminal fines and $1.72 billion in civil penalties paid to the federal government and states.
A record $168 million will be paid out to whistleblowers across three states.
Attorney General Eric Holder described Johnson & Johnson as having "lined their pockets at the expense of American taxpayers, patients and the private insurance industry."
What does this settlement mean for you?
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Health Insurance Sites Spark Frustration
Americans are frustrated with the roll out of the health insurance exchange under the Affordable Care Act. As a result, they're steering clear of the insurance sites that the government has been pushing over the past several months. In fact, it's estimated that only 17% of people who don't have insurance have attempted to purchase on the marketplace sites.
As the frustration grows, the websites continue to crash and experience complete outages. Technicians aren't yet sure whether the sites will see dramatic improvements anytime soon.
Why has the roll-out of the health insurance exchange been so rocky?
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Your Money
What are the tax savings generated by your mortgage?
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For the Lawyers
Seventh Circuit allows class action with individual damages, rejecting strict reading of Comcast Corp. v. Behrend.
The Seventh Circuit rejected the notion that a class action cannot proceed if there might be individualized damages. The court stated:
It would drive a stake through the heart of the class action device, in cases in which damages were sought rather than an injunction or a declaratory judgment, to require that every member of the class have identical damages. If the issues of liability are genuinely common issues, and the damages of individual class members can be readily determined in individual hearings, in settlement negotiations, or by creation of subclasses, the fact that damages are not identical across all class members should not preclude class certification. Otherwise defendants would be able to escape liability for tortious harms of enormous aggregate magnitude but so widely distributed as not to be remediable in individual suits.
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