Author Archive

Counting Your Blessings, Counting Your Pills

November 25th, 2010. By Hunter West

Can we talk?

Today is Thanksgiving—a time to count your blessings, in spite of an economic climate that may have left us with fewer blessings overall to count. And tomorrow may be a blacker Black Friday than normal, because we may not have the financial wherewithal to hit the stores and take advantage of all the deals. 

Be that as it may, on this day we count our blessings nonetheless—in between counting the various pills designed to keep us comfortable, to keep us alive. 

And to keep the drug companies not only in business, but thriving. 

Here’s the question… 

Do we really need to take all these drugs we are using? Have we become soft? Always looking towards the path of least resistance? 

We all learned from a young age that shortcuts often get us into trouble. “Do it right, do it once, measure it twice, cut it once, take no short-cuts,” Daddy always told us. 

You can’t take a short cut to a university education. Some do—by applying for those spiffy, legitimate-looking online diplomas that are worth nothing more than the paper they’re printed on. Taking a short cut to the corner office at work often means stabbing others in the back, or worse… 

My point is, you can’t take a short cut to your health. A person can’t expect to exude health by eating crap, drinking excessively and sitting on the couch all day (Thanksgiving aside, of course…). 

You can’t lose weight and keep it off without changing your lifestyle and getting regular exercise. 

You can’t put your faith in a pill and trust it will fix everything—particularly when the likes of Meridia, Avandia or Paxil are what’s in the pill bottle. 

But that’s what appears to be happening… 

There are pills for everything. Having to get up to pee in the night. Having heartburn. Having Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Drugs
Posted in Drugs/Medical | 2 Comments »

Investment Tip? Legal Lending: Place your Bets!

November 18th, 2010. By Hunter West

Would you entertain an investment that pays up to 24 percent annually? Sound too good to be true? A Ponzi scheme? 

Au contraire, Mon ami. Litigation is the new investment playground, my darlings… 

One aspect of the legal system that will surprise some is the growth in legal lending. That’s right—the business of lending (for profit) in order to fund litigation. 

Lawsuits are expensive. The larger legal houses may have the financial clout to self-finance. However for the remainder, financing the action in order to get you through to the settlement (and the payoff) can be a hardship, if not impossible. 

So lawyers borrow money to fund lawsuits from entities that are in the business of doing just that. 

The New York Times recently ran a fascinating story based on an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit based in Washington. There are a number of firms that specialize in floating loans to legal firms in order to finance lawsuits—presumably, after their efforts to secure financing through ordinary channels (the charted banks) fall through. 

In comes Counsel Financial, based in Buffalo and financed by CitiGroup. There’s also LawFinance Group. And LawCash, based in Brooklyn. They come to the rescue when traditional Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Lawsuit Investing, Legal Funding, Legal Lending
Posted in lawsuits, Lawyers | No Comments »

Is This What Our Vets Fought For? We’ve gone AWOL on them…

November 11th, 2010. By Hunter West

It’s Veteran’s Day today. A day when the country stops (hopefully), to give pause to those brave men and women who fought the great fight, so that we may be free. 

But there’s more to it than that. Our veterans served with honor, on behalf of their countrymen. Their country. 

What would they think of how [much of] America conducts itself today? 

Greedy banks granted mortgages, and loaned money to people who could ill afford to support the payments, all in the name of getting more business on the books than the next guy. That’s the simple answer for the sub-prime mortgage mess that resulted in the burst of the housing bubble and driving the US economy into a deep recession. 

Thousands have lost their homes, their jobs, and their livelihoods due to greed on the part of others. 

Is this what our veteran’s fought for? 

Some drug manufacturers sell pharmaceuticals while knowing they could be harmful—even Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: VA Benefits, VA Claims, Veterans, Veterans Day, Vets
Posted in Veterans | No Comments »

Whistle while you Work? Sad Reality in American Business

November 2nd, 2010. By Hunter West

Anyone who is aghast at the recent $750 million GlaxoSmithKline (Glaxo) whistleblower judgment to settle manufacturing deficiencies at a former plant in Puerto Rico shouldn’t be surprised that such things are going on. Happens all the time, it seems. And not just to Glaxo, either. 

In actual fact, that $750 million—of which the whistleblower earns a share of the penalty totaling a whopping $96 million—pales in comparison to the $3.1 billion that the US Department of Justice has recovered under the federal False Claims Act so far in just this fiscal year alone. 

Last year the haul was almost twice that—$5.6 billion. 

Some will say that the whistleblower is an opportunist hoping for a big payday in the end, and will take any amount of criticism and crap en route to the pot at the end of the rainbow. Hell, I’d put up with a lot of grief to collect $96 million. 

I would even eat liver. 

But to those who view whistleblowers as ambulance chasers, consider the amount of fraud and wrongdoing that serves as a persistent blight on the business landscape. Somebody has to expose such misdeeds—and if the government can’t route out the evil-doers (sorry ‘W’…) on their own, then they have to provide incentive for those who can. 

We would all wish that whistleblowers were not necessary. In a perfect world every business and corporate entity would operate with integrity and play by the rules.

Sadly, that’s not the case. 

According to Taxpayers Against Fraud, a not-for-profit that supports whistleblower lawsuits, Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Avandia, Eckard, GlaxoSmithKline, GSK, paxil, Qui Tam, Whistleblower
Posted in Whistleblower | No Comments »

Menaflex: Influence Peddling at the FDA

October 22nd, 2010. By Hunter West

The revelation last week that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would rescind a product previously given FDA approval, is yet another example of why the FDA needs to be overhauled from the ground up and the top down. 

That’s because, according to a report October 14^th in The New York Times, a medical device roundly criticized by the FDA’s own scientists and reviewers was approved by the agency largely due to political pressure (read lobbying) and the intervention of the former FDA Commissioner. 

Worse, it appears as though this situation was one “of several” at the agency in which outside forces were allowed to be brought to bear over the FDA’s own good scientific counsel. 

And this is the agency that ensures the drugs we take, and the medical devices we use are trustworthy? 

Oh…my…God… 

The issue is over Menaflex, an implantable knee patch manufactured by ReGen. According to an FDA report launched to investigate undue outside influence in its own agency, it was determined that the Menaflex product was given FDA approval in spite of the repeated, and unanimous declarations of FDA reviewers that Menaflex did not meet the criteria for approval. 

It should be noted that the FDA employs a fast-track route for approval if it is determined an Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: FDA, implantable knee patch, Menaflex, NJ, ReGen
Posted in Defective Products, Drugs/Medical | No Comments »