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Copyright Since September 11,
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This web site is in no manner affiliated with any Kaiser entity and the for profit Permanente Permission is granted to mirror this web site - Please acknowledge where the material was obtained. Damages award against Kaiser $3.3 million for man who had surgery he didn't need - Alex Barnum, Chronicle Staff Writer Thursday, December 2, 2004 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/12/02/BAGDLA51NT1.DTL A Berkeley man who was left nearly blind following heart bypass surgery he did not need has been awarded $3.3 million in one of the largest malpractice decisions against Kaiser Permanente in recent years. An arbitration panel made the award Tuesday to Kamal Azari, 51, a real estate developer, and his wife, Pari Azari. The couple received $500,000 in damages for pain and suffering, the maximum under state law, and he received $2.8 million in special damages for medical costs and loss of future earnings. Azari's attorney, Marvin Lewis Jr. of San Francisco, said his client had been devastated by his medical ordeal.
Kaiser
admitted
some liability in the case, saying
that its doctors, instead of operating on Azari's heart, should have
taken
a more conservative approach, said spokeswoman Maureen McInaney. But
she
said the HMO's doctors did not agree that the damage to Azari's vision
was as severe as he claimed.
Azari's attorney and medical consultants, however, alleged that Kaiser doctors had made grave mistakes at many stages of his treatment.
Azari, who also
owns a ranch in Petaluma, went to
Kaiser San Rafael in September 2002, complaining of pain in his left
arm
when he exercised. After a stress test and a procedure to look for
arterial
blockages, Kaiser doctors concluded that Azari needed bypass surgery to
improve blood flow to his heart.
But Azari's
attorney and consulting experts said
that Kaiser doctors had misread the results and that both tests had, in
fact, shown Azari had good blood flow. In the case of the stress test,
Azari's consulting doctor said that Kaiser physicians must simply have
read another patient's test result.
Then, as Azari was
recuperating from bypass surgery
at Kaiser's San Francisco hospital, doctors for many hours failed to
recognize
he was bleeding internally, his attorney said -- and that when they
did,
they failed to correct it properly. His blindness occurred from the
loss
of oxygen-carrying blood to his eyes.
Azari is nearly
blind in his left eye and has only
30 percent of the vision in his right eye, his attorney said. The
three-person
arbitration panel concluded that his ability to continue working had
been
severely impaired and that he would have to hire others to do the work
in his real estate business.
Kaiser patients
must resolve malpractice claims and
other disputes through binding arbitration, and most are settled or
dropped
before they ever reach a hearing. Of nearly 3,300 cases resolved from
1999
to 2003, only 14 percent made it to a hearing, and 5 percent resulted
in
awards. The largest award was for $5.6 million.
A 1975 state law
put a $250,000 cap on the amount
of damages that a plaintiff can win for "pain and suffering" in medical
malpractice cases. Critics of the law, including patients' rights
groups
and malpractice lawyers, say the cap should be raised to reflect higher
living costs and increases in doctors' salaries since the law was
enacted.
E-mail Alex Barnum
at abarnum@sfchronicle.com.
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