When Attorneys General Attack

A couple of months ago, I wrote an op-ed (Lives for Votes) about New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer’s latest nuisance lawsuit – this time against several makers of defibrillators and other implantable cardiac devices (ICDs). Of the roughly 2.65 million patients who had ICDs surgically implanted from 1990 to 2002, 61 of them died when their devices malfunctioned. While the individual patients probably had valid products liability claims, Spitzer was suing because the manufacturers did not inform the other 99.998 percent fast enough that there might possibly be a systemic problem. Never mind that nobody knew at the time whether there was a systemic problem, and that such a low error rate suggested that there probably was not.

I argued that warning cardiac patients too soon could actually cause many to try and eliminate the ICD risk by having the devices removed. That, however, would probably kill even more people needlessly, since the risks of heart surgery are pretty significant in their own right. A new study by doctors at the Cleveland Clinic reported on in today’s Wall Street Journal (No Increased Death Risk Detected From Recalled Heart Defibrillators) confirms my argument.

Would somebody please stop Eliot Spitzer before he strikes again?

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Greg Conko