Bob, Carmen, Troy and Alana Pack

July 11, 2013 - Commentary in the Sacramento Bee
http://www.sacbee.com/2013/07/11/5558754/cap-on-medical-negligence-claims.html
This article is on this site for historical purposes.

Viewpoints: Cap on medical negligence claims is outdated and unfair to victims
By Robert Pack
Special to The Bee
Published: Thursday, Jul. 11, 2013 - 12:00 am | Page 11A

When my 7-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son died suddenly on a roadside nine years ago, I was forced to confront not only the unimaginable grief of losing my young children forever, but also the reality that doctor discipline and accountability in California don't exist.

Alana and Troy were walking on a sidewalk in Danville with my wife, Carmen, when a drugged driver fell unconscious at the wheel and swerved off the road, killing my two children and injuring Carmen. We also ended up losing our unborn twins as well.

The driver, Jimena Barreto, turned out to be a doctor-shopping drug addict who was convicted of second-degree murder and imprisoned for 30 years to life. The Kaiser doctors who prescribed her thousands of pills, however, were never held accountable for their negligence.

Barreto had no physical symptoms, but managed to stockpile narcotics without any oversight.

In the wake of my family's tragedy, I found that Kaiser's doctors had no idea they were all over-prescribing to the same doctor shopper. There was no computer system tracking prescriptions patients received. Since my background is in technology, I developed the electronic CURES database, a searchable system that tracks prescriptions dispensed in California.

Today, the tool is at the disposal of every doctor, law enforcement official and regulator in the state. Unfortunately, most of them don't use it.

This is the sad story of the last 3 1/2 decades in California: physicians largely unwilling to police themselves, regulators turning a blind eye to available information about dangerous doctors, and a lack of legal deterrence to medical negligence.

The core of the failed doctor disciplinary system that killed my four children dates back to 1975. It was a punch in my gut when I learned that a California law capped the value of my children's lives at $250,000.

Jerry Brown signed the law in his first term as governor, 37 years ago, and the amount has never been adjusted for inflation.

At the time, doctors promised that a strong new regulatory system would make up for the lost deterrence of the legal system, but patient safety scandals continue to rock California.

Kaiser still doesn't utilize the CURES database. The physicians responsible for the death of my children were never disciplined by the California Medical Board. In fact, the current president of the medical board was the medical director at Kaiser who refused to make changes at the HMO following my family's tragedy.

In 1975, legislators made $22,000 per year. Back then, a gallon of gasoline cost 57 cents. The value of everything has gone up since 1975, but not the $250,000 cap on the value of a child's life.

The law is one size fits all, no matter how clear the negligence or how catastrophic the injury or loss. It sets a fixed cap on the value of a child's life, and does the same to others whose quality of life is destroyed when their limbs, or vision, or ability to have a child are taken away by negligent doctors.

Of course, Troy and Alana were priceless. No amount of money can replace them. But when a child's life is valued so little, patients face continued risks because the medical establishment has no incentive to change.

It's time to adjust this 37-year-old cap so it is in line with the cost of living. Recently Barry Keene, the author of the law, came forward to say it should be indexed for inflation, and that was always the Legislature's intent.

There is no danger malpractice insurance rates will rise. Since 1988, California's malpractice insurance rates have been tightly regulated.

Unfortunately, the Legislature has not acted, which is why I am working with Consumer Watchdog on a ballot initiative, "The Troy and Alana Pack Patient Safety Act," for the 2014 ballot. If California lawmakers are unwilling to prevent another family from going through the same tragedy Carmen and I faced, the voters will have their chance.

Robert Pack is the founder of the Troy and Alana Pack Foundation and a leader of www.38istoolate.org.

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

Response from Dina Padilla:

Dear Robert Pack,

I want to say first that I am truly sorry to have read your article in today's Sac Bee about the loss of all of your children in the tragic accident. I don't know that I could have been so brave to continue on in life as you have. What you have done to advocate for your children's memory is even more ever so courageous and noble on their behalf.

Your story rang many bells in terms of what Kaiser was able to do, which was to give out so many meds to the driver, Jimena Barreto without proper over site.

This is just one of many stories that I know about only too well.

I worked at kaiser from 1985 till 1993.

I had to leave on worker comp claims and part of the first claim was the abuse of patients. One of the abuses was the over medicating of both employees and patients, among other egregious unnecessary surgeries resulting in intentional deaths. I saw it first hand. We had many female employees who were given far too many medications that were mind and physical altering. Many of these women were actually working and were like medicated zombies.

The same applied to patients. The way I view it that this is Kaiser's main idea of medical care, giving meds to just shut people up about their medical needs and it is a lot cheaper than run tests and or provide any/all of the medical care necessary for a patient (employees were patients too)'s recovery!

I want to help you in any way that I can. I am disabled thanks to Kaiser along with so many others and started a group in 1992 (VOICES/B.E.S.T). for injured workers who were over medicated for their injuries even after they were over medicated while on the job. What was one of the worse cases was that while kaiser doctors were giving employees the biggest bottles of mind altering drugs like anti-depressants, pain killers, tranquilizers, anti-psychotic and sleeping meds, these women were expected to work under horrible conditions with huge workloads and under staffing. When these women could no longer work being over medicated and the bad working environment, they were then disciplined, forced out on comp claims (kaiser started that ball rolling in 1990) an then fired them on trumped up charges like being drunk while on job when in fact it was being on so many meds) only for these employees/patients to be continually given more meds.

I have to say that I never worked for such an abusive employer in my life and I worked for other large companies and that one of the biggest abuses was over medicating their employees and patients. I saw this in the hospital and clinics and it still goes on without any accountability!

I started and advocacy group because of the 7 female suicides (1990-1992) and they were all over medicated as it turned out. A few of them shot themselves. This began my quest for justice and also to help prevent more employee suicides, although I failed at one in 1994, where a female employee who was sexually harassed, one of many abuses that occurred decided to shoot herself.

If you need more info about me and the work I do, I am on kaiserpapers.org under employees harmed by kaiser (we were patients too, a long story on kaiser's abuses to us employees and as patients). This website is dedicated to educate patients, their families and employees alike about the many abuses committed by Kaiser to its patients and employees. We were sued in 2008 in a SLAPP suit that allowed a movie studio and a kaiser medical complex to be built on one of the most toxic lands in the U.S.

We won and the movie studio is now a pile of rubble but because of Kaiser's ability to be immune to any state or federal law, kaiser's still gets to see patients on the brownfield site.

We know about the kaiser doctor as a board medical examiner and that there were or are probably more all to cover up kaiser's many medical mistakes. This is now the way of the medical community to rig a system to make sure people not only receive the correct amount of award, patients and their family needs but more so to help hide the medical malpractice over all. AND it happens more than ever.

Words cannot express enough the belief or relief that you were able to get your story out because your case involved kaiser.

I have been writing to the BEE, have had a business columnist go to one of our medical treater's outside of kaiser, after talking with the columnist at the BEE main office on R St. to show the writer that there weren't 20 female patients just for the heck of it.

We've been to just about every local, state and federal agency, filed lawsuits in civil and worker com court, all just for us to just lose because the system is so rigged for the medical community starting with Kaiser.

Please remember, if there is a way I can help, I will, just to see the travesty of justice turned on its face.

I will be cc'ing a copy of this letter to Vickie Travis who too suffered at the hands of what is perhaps one of the most abusive systems in this state, called medical malpractice.

I am truly so sorry for you and your wife's loss!!!

God Bless!

Sincerely,

Dina J. Padilla

1-916-342-880

Bob and Carmen Pack, who recently learned that the Walnut Creek nanny accused of running down their two children might have been abusing the prescription painkiller Vicodin, said at a news conference outside Kaiser's corporate offices they were pushing for a statewide, real-time database that would allow doctors and pharmacists to access medical records.

Their children Troy, 10, and Alana, 7, died in October 2003 after allegedly being hit by Jimena Barreto, 46.

According to transcripts from grand jury testimony, Barreto told police she had taken Vicodin and muscle relaxants the day of the accident. A Kaiser doctor who treated her days before the accident testified that she had been seen by several doctors and given six different Vicodin prescriptions.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/01/14/BAG94APU0C1.DTL