jail

[me]

to answer a few emails

7 months is not unusual for a motion to be in front of a judge, especially as complex and as secretive as the 7th was. Give him time, lots of krap to dig thru

[shcook]

I'm a bit confused. What is going on? Is the Seventh Amendment before the Judge again? The same Judge? Is there a possibility it might be overturned? I am afraid I must be out of the loop as I don't have any idea as to what is going on.

I had heard that issues would be brought to light, but so far no one has kept me informed at all as to what is going on.

[tiepaevic]

I too am waiting anxiously to see if anything can be done with the 7th. What a sham. I think it was meant to do just what it did. Screw many people out of their money, scaring them into thinking they would receive nothing. No time to decide on whether or not to take the 7th. Wyeth and all legal parties got more than most people, even though those claimants live with or die with the effects of this miracle diet drug. Suffer ! you bet I do. If a judge is doing his job, he will see this has been smoke and mirrors from day 1. Yes many people got money without even taking the drug, shame on them, and the ones that quickly settled with them. Now I suffer with minimal monies, and others received none. I feel even sorrier for them, sick, and some dying or dead without a nickel. Give me what I deserve! I am not asking for more than that. This is one of the most disgusting examples of greed, and mismanagement I have ever seen. Can't someone help the victims?

[me]

From Forbes Magazine 4/10/06
But even a lawyer on the claimant side admits to some concern. "There was an intentional effort to game the system," says Michael Fishbein, the court-appointed lead lawyer for the entire class of fen-phen users covered by an early $3.75 billion trust that Wyeth agreed to set up in late 1999. He believes 70% of the most serious claims, for severe damage to heart valves, were "medically unfounded and unjustified because the claimant doesn't have the condition."
That gold attracted some out-and-out crooks--so far 26 people have been charged with submitting fraudulent claims--and a lot of claimants who were pushing the boundaries of legitimacy. By some estimates 70% of the billions paid for the most serious claims went to patients who aren't sick and don't deserve it. That adds up to $6 billion or more in payments that were fraudulent or in error. It may add up to one of the biggest tort scams ever, waged by a cabal of doctors and lawyers plying a tortuous legal system.
Tom Lamb who helped break this settlement fraud offered this:
Federal Authorities Investigating Suspected Fraud in Fen-phen Class Action Settlement
Some Claimants' Lawyers May Have Submitted Bogus Heart-damage Claims
The U.S. Attorney's Office in Philadelphia and the FBI are investigating allegations of fraud in the $5 billion fen-phen class action settlement. The federal investigators are examining tens of thousands of claims asserting heart damage from the fen-phen diet-drug combination to determine whether lawyers, doctors, and medical technicians conspired to submit bogus claims, according to a September 18, 2005 article by Emilie Lounsberry in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Before being recalled in 1997, an estimated 6 million people took Pondimin or Redux in the prescription diet-drug combination known as fen-phen. American Home Products, now known as Wyeth, was the drug company responsible for fen-phen.
Shortly after a Texas woman was awarded $23 million by a jury, American Home Products / Wyeth settled many of the other pending fen-phen cases and, ultimately, created a multibillion-dollar settlement fund called the American Home Products ("AHP") / Wyeth fen-phen Trust for future cases. In order to get compensation from the AHP / Wyeth fen-phen Trust, claimants only had to show that they had taken the Wyeth fen-phen pills and that they had developed heart-valve problems. To be clear, these fen-phen claimants did not have to provide the class action settlement Trust with actual "causation" proof showing that, in their particular case, it was the fen-phen use that damaged their heart.
In this context, AHP / Wyeth expected about 36,000 claims to be submitted to the fen-phen Trust for consideration and payment. Remarkably, however, more than 87,000 fen-phen claims were submitted to the AHP / Wyeth Trust. As the number of fen-phen claims grew, so did the level of suspicion about bogus heart-damage claims being submitted by some claimants and their lawyers.
Suspicious of the larger than expected number of claims, in 2003 the AHP / Wyeth fen-phen Trust hired Dr. Joseph Kisslo, a Duke University cardiologist, to audit 968 fen-phen class action settlement claims that had been submitted to the Trust for payment. Remarkably, and to the interest of federal prosecutors, Dr. Kisslo found that 70 percent of the required echocardiograms in support of those 968 claims contained "material misrepresentations" which, according to Kisslo's opinion as a medical doctor, amounted to "pervasive fraud." Essentially, according to Dr. Kisslo, these fen-phen claimant's echocardiograms had been manipulated by various means to give a false image of heart-valve damage.
We turn to Emilie Lounsberry's September 2005 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer for reactions to the federal criminal investigation from some of the primary players in the fen-phen litigation:
• "Doug Petkus, a Wyeth spokesman, said the company was 'in favor of this type of inquiry' and would cooperate in an investigation."
• "'I think there has been a significant amount of fraud in this claims process,'" said [Philadelphia] lawyer Michael Fishbein, who is counsel for [the fen-phen] class-action plaintiffs.... He estimates that up to 85 percent of claims may be questionable."
• "... U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle 3d, who is presiding over the federal fen-phen litigation and the settlement, has repeatedly expressed alarm about fraud. [¶]In May, he threw out the case of a Texas woman, Cheryl Yvonne Barnett, who contended she took Redux for about four months in 1989, then developed valve disease. [¶]Bartle cited serious problems with her claim: Redux wasn't available until 1996; the pharmacy that she said filled her prescription was a parking lot, and the doctor who she said prescribed the drug did not exist. [¶].... 'There can be no doubt,' Bartle said, 'that an attempt was made to perpetrate a fraud upon Wyeth and the court.'"
• "Former Chief U.S. District Judge Louis C. Bechtle, who presided over the fen-phen case until he retired in 2001, said in an interview last week that mass tort cases generally have been tainted by 'hyped-up claims.' [¶]Settlement funds are at risk for depletion before worthy claimants are compensated, he said, and the courts do not have the resources to 'police' the legitimacy of claims. [¶]Bechtle called it a 'national calamity' and said the legal system must come up with a way to restore litigants' faith. [¶]'The courts,' he said, 'are the only place people can turn.'"
And lastly this article which gives examples of this diet drug settlement screening fraud.
From Fen-Phen Follies

Under the settlement agreement, Wyeth had the right to ask its own doctors to review claimants' echocardiograms. Wyeth-paid cardiologists began raising questions about some of the tapes they reviewed, particularly tapes sent by claimants whose law firms were high-volume filers. The echocardiograms were sometimes fuzzy, which made measurements of the left atrial chamber critical for big-money Level II claims difficult to pinpoint.

And some of the work seemed suspicious: Why, Wyeth doctors asked, were transducers sometimes positioned strangely on patients' chests? Why were dials on echocardiograph machines sometimes set in a way that appeared to exaggerate the severity of patients' disease? Wyeth's lawyers started to wonder if plaintiffs lawyers had figured out how to game the system, deliberately enhancing their clients' claims through manipulated echocardiograms. "We kept pushing the trust [auditors] to look at the tapes and green forms," says Wyeth counsel Brown. "We realized you can make [the level of disease] look worse than it is."

The trust's new audit-everything policy turned up evidence of the industry that the fen-phen litigation had spawned. Trust counsel Chirls hired Richard Scheff of Philadelphia's Montgomery, McCracken, Walker & Rhoads to act as special counsel for the trust. Scheff, a former federal prosecutor who specializes in white-collar criminal defense and corporate investigations, says he had never before encountered anything like the shenanigans in the fen-phen litigation. "I was stunned," he says. "Stunned. Truly, truly stunned."

Some law firms were holding mass echocardiograph sessions in law offices and hotel rooms. Entire companies, derisively termed "echo mills," had sprung up simply to offer echocardiograms to fen-phen users.
Such mass processing, lawyers for Wyeth and the trust came to believe, was producing illegitimate claims. In March 2004 Wyeth asked Judge Bartle to halt payments by the trust. Auditors had by then reviewed 4,600 claims, and had disqualified almost two-thirds of them. Almost 50 law firms, all of them high-volume filers in the trust, had more than half of their claims rejected. Wyeth counsel Zimroth described the trust's audit results as evidence of "widespread corruption." Even class counsel Fishbein, now placed in the peculiar and uncomfortable position of a plaintiffs lawyer forced to suspect his brethren, admitted that the medical model he had envisioned had instead become an echocardiogram production line.
Wyeth in-house lawyers did not respond to requests for comment, but outside counsel Orran Brown says the company continues to consider the fen-phen class action settlement a success.

It's not an unreasonable position. Even with portable echo mills in hotel rooms and doctors who didn't meet patients and lawyers training sonographers how to set echocardiograph dials for maximum effect, Wyeth only had to pony up an extra $1.275 billion to cap its fen-phen liability in the class action an enormous sum by most scales, but little more than a nuisance by diet drug litigation standards. All of those aggressive motions against suspect doctors and lawyers will likely be dismissed if Judge Bartle, as expected, grants final approval to the Seventh Amendment.

Scheff, the special trust counsel who filed them, points out that businesses have every right to use money to make a problem go away. "Wyeth recognizes that in the process, claims that are completely illegal may get paid," he says.


So why haven't you been told that your echo was manipulated?

Why did these party's force you into the seventh and conveniently overlook the fact THAT YOU ARE SUPPOSE TO KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT YOUR CLAIM BEFORE>>>>>>BEFORE>>>> YOU DECIDED TO GO WITH THE SEVENTH OR STAY IN THE ORIGINAL SETTLEMENT. It is REQUIRED that you are suppose to know all of the facts of your case BEFORE you make such a decision....

(we don't need no steenkin WYETH to tell the judge it is okay that 10's of thousands of echoes were manipulated...THE OWNERS OF THOSE TENS OF THOUSANDS OF ECHOES WERE THE ONES SCREWED OUT OF RECEIVING A BENEFIT THAT WAS PROMISED BY THE FAIRNESS HEARINGS!........YOU ARE THE ONES WHO SHOULD HAVE BEEN GIVEN THE OPTION OF PROCEEDING WITH A TAMPERED WITH ECHO!)

ten months and counting on the 60 (b)s