New Report Looks At Intersection of "Medical Lending" and Pelvic Mesh Lawsuits

A recent article in Reuters shed an interesting and potentially disturbing light on the “medical lending” industry, which operates in some cases by funding surgeries for patients involved in litigation over allegedly defective medical devices. The article focused on pelvic mesh lawsuits against device companies—one of the biggest sources of personal injury litigation in the country. Financers here will “invest” in operations to remove implants from women suing the device makers, and “reap an inflated share of the payouts when cases settle,” according to the report. The way this works, in short, is that medical funders, often through a middleman representative or attorney, contact surgeons to perform operations to remove pelvic mesh implants in patients involved in the tort litigation. The funder might offer surgeons a guaranteed $2,500 per procedure (in the Reuters example), which might be similar or slightly higher than the discounted rates insurers might pay for the procedure. The funders then wait for the patient's legal case to settle and place liens against those settlements for the full, non-discounted costs of the surgeries. Reuters reports that medical lenders have asked patients to pay as much as $62,000 for the removal surgery. The standard insurance reimbursement rate is between $2,000 and $7,000, according to the article. And there are arguments in support of this arrangement. The surgically inserted mesh devices, while intended to treat urinary inco...
Source: Policy and Medicine - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs