Due to Compensation Claims, Johnson & Johnson Hires Own Insurance Agency

Due to Compensation Claims, Johnson & Johnson Hires Own Insurance Agency

When DePuy Orthopaedics and its parent company, Johnson & Johnson (J&J), initiated the hip replacement recall, it crafted a  compensation program that would reimburse hip recipients for the “reasonable and customary” costs associated with another surgery. With this, Johnson & Johnson appointed Broadspire Services, a subsidiary of insurance company, Crawford & Crawford.
 
The New York Times featured about the compensation policies of Johnson & Johnson, DePuy and Broadspire on December 27, 2011. According to the article, “things were not going smoothly for everyone who has had accepted DePuy’s payment offer.”
 
 With approximately 93,000 recipients worldwide, the ASR XL Acetabular System and the ASR Hip Resurfacing System were recalled after data revealed that the devices fail prematurely in one out of eight people who have them.
 
“It is a complete untruth that DePuy did not have reason to withdraw the ASR before now; we have been telling them since 2007, but they allowed it to be used on thousands of people,” according to Dr. Stephen Graves, the director of the National Joint Replacement Registry in Australia.
 
 In a statement, a spokeswoman for DePuy, Mindy Tinsley, said, “We believe we made the appropriate decision to recall at the appropriate time given the available information.”
 
As of March 31, 2011, the company had committed $ 280 million in compensatory settlements to the recalls. It also pledged to “address reasonable and customary costs associated with testing and treatment,” including new hips for those who need them. The presence of the metal parts may boost the amount of chromium and cobalt in the blood. This may cause metallosis (blood poisoning) and genotoxicity (genetic damage).  Chromium and cobalt have also been linked to cancer, and might lead to the development of tumors.
 
In May 2011, various medical professionals and engineers formed a group which aimed to track knee and hip implants after the DePuy hip replacement recall.
 
 “The goal is to track the more than 700,000 total hip and knee replacement surgeries that take place in the U.S. each year and, over time, record which implants failed prematurely, requiring revision surgery to fix the original operation,” explains AJRRchairman David Lewallen, a professor of orthopedic surgery at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
 
 The hip replacement recall definitely prodded the manufacturer to act on the need of the consumers to have safe medical treatments and medications. With the number of duly filed DePuy lawsuit increasing worldwide, DePuy should properly face the hip replacement problems encountered by its clients.  {It needs to disseminate more information about defective hip replacement symptoms so that the patients would be given immediate medical attention.