By: Dave Davidson
On June 8, 2017 the Florida Supreme Court, in a 4-3 opinion, ruled that the legislatively-established caps on non-economic damages (such as awards for pain and suffering) in medical malpractice cases are unconstitutional. In 2014 the Florida Supreme Court determined the cap established for wrongful death claims was unconstitutional. The 2017 decision now does away with the remaining caps.Continue reading
By: Karina Gonzalez
With the opioid epidemic in South Florida at crisis levels, there is an increasing demand on local hospital emergency departments for screening and evaluations of drug overdoses, considered a medical emergency. Addiction treatment law evolves with EMTALA updates. Many patients receiving substance abuse treatment in this community are coming from out-of-state. Many are young, under 35 years and a majority receive outpatient services. Overdoses are occurring more frequently as patients deliberately misuse opioid prescriptions such as Fentanyl or an illicit drugs such as heroin. If the patient possesses and or uses an illicit drug while in treatment, the policy in many facilities is to terminate treatment and discharge the patient. But if the patient has overdosed, the facility will place a call to 911 and that patient will end up with a visit to a local emergency department. A discharged patient will often continue using and end up in the emergency department, taken there by paramedics or some other individual.
Local emergency departments now play a pivotal role in the next steps that an overdosed patient may take. Is the patient receiving their EMTALA rights (Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act), a federal law requiring anyone coming to a hospital emergency department to be screened and examined? If an emergency medical condition exists, treatment is provided to relieve or eliminate the emergency medical condition within the service capability of the hospital, a difficult task with substance abuse. Continue reading
I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer,
to treat everything as if it were a nail
–Abraham Maslow, “Toward a Psychology of Being”
By: Jeff Cohen & Randy Goldberg
The dominant forces of change in the addiction treatment industry are law enforcement and insurance companies. The focus and impact of insurers is currently focused on the argument that what treatment providers do isn’t medically necessary. This rationale is undeniably misguided and is the biggest threat to the survival of many health care providers, including those at the forefront of adapting to the demands by implementing meaningful legal regulatory compliance. This focus of this article is a parallel intervening factor in the addiction treatment industry: that of law enforcement, most notably in Palm Beach County, Florida. Consequently, providers in the addiction treatment space and their employees are becoming increasingly familiar with the concept of immunity as they are deal with law enforcement on a routine basis.
We assume there are bad-actors in the addiction treatment space. There are bad-actors in every industry and profession. No one can appreciate that more than this article’s co-author, Randy Goldberg. He is a retired Florida law enforcement professional, who spent a significant portion of his career investigating law enforcement officers for alleged criminal misconduct, having been deeply involved in the arrest and successful prosecution of law enforcement officers who abused their authority and strayed to the dark-side of the law. Continue reading
