USA Today reports that plaintiffs’ lawyers have asked for the heavy punishment to end ‘business as usual’ at large corporations and on Wall Street which has led to a culture of profits being put ahead of patient safety.
Outbreak
Las Vegas lawyer Robert Eglet, senior partner at Eglet Wall, said that the jury must ‘speak loud enough’ for the Health Plan of Nevada and Sierra Health Services to ‘get the message’.
Lawyers representing the health companies urged the jury not to be swayed by the emotional rhetoric and instead remember instructions given by the judge when the trial began 10 weeks ago.
According to the report, only last week jurors awarded $24 million in compensatory damages to three plaintiffs - including two women who became infected with hepatitis C in 2005. The outbreak became public three years later.
Federal proceedings
A following nine infections were traced back to clinics run by Dipak Desai, who was not a defendant in the civil suit but is facing state and federal criminal charges over the outbreak. Mr Desai’s state trial is to begin later this month, with the federal proceedings set for May.
Meanwhile, the Southern Nevada Health District has notified more than 50,000 patients to get tested for the sometimes-fatal infection as well as other blood-borne diseases.
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