Under the plan, the average homeowner will receive a total refund of $221 and an additional rate reduction of $51. The refund, believed to be the largest of its kind in the nation, will be paid as a credit on electric bills over a 12-month period beginning in November.
The refund and rate cut stem from the settlement of six pending lawsuits challenging Edison's rates. Several of those cases have been dragging through the courts and the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC) for years.
"Consumers have been waiting years for the refunds Comm Ed owes," said CUB executive director Susan Stewart. "This agreement will end those delays once and for all and guarantee ratepayers immediate reductions on their electric bills. For consumers who have been fed up with Edison's high electric rates, that's a great deal."
The bulk of the refund and rate cut stems from a January 1993 case in which CUB and other consumer groups convinced the Illinois Commerce Commission to order a $339 million rate cut and a $600 million refund for Edison customers. The company appealed that ruling and the savings to consumers never materialized. Under the current plan, Edison will drop its appeal and comply with the Commission's January 1993 ruling.
Stewart said the agreement is a vindication of the battles CUB and other consumer groups have waged against Edison rate hikes. "For years, CUB has been fighting Comm Ed's attempts to charge consumers billions of dollars for three unneeded nuclear power plants," Stewart said. "This agreement means those efforts have paid off big for consumers."
The refund agreement must be approved by the courts and by the ICC.
"For a company to engage in a pattern of using unsuspecting patients as guinea pigs and operating rooms as laboratories for unapproved products, shows a blatant disregard for the health and safety of the patients who literally entrusted their lives to the company's products," said Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner David Kessler.
Bard, one of the world's largest health care products companies, will pay $30.5 million to settle civil charges, and pay the largest criminal penalty ever imposed in a medical case - $30.9 million.
A heart catheter is a wire with a balloon-like tip which is temporarily threaded into a person's coronary arteries by a doctor and then inflated. The device widens the path through which blood can flow to the heart muscle.
The company pleaded guilty to conducting illegal experiments on people with the unapproved catheters, including illegal testing of catheters on people for the purpose of determining whether the catheters were safe and effective. Bard also pleaded guilty to changing the designs of catheters without seeking approval from the FDA for the changes.
The Justice Department said the catheter tips broke off within the coronary artery in about 50 patients, requiring about 22 emergency coronary artery bypass graft surgeries, and causing one heart attack. The failure of a catheter to deflate while being used by an interventional cardiologist caused one death.
"The management of C.R. Bard, Inc. sincerely regrets the activities that led to this plea agreement," said Bard spokesman William Reilly. "I want to reassure our customers and patients that Bard products, including all angioplasty products, have received all necessary FDA approvals."
In a letter to the steering committee of lawyers representing women injured by the breast implants, Dr. Norman Anderson called the proposed settlement "seriously flawed" and urged the committee to reject it. Anderson said the medical damages from breast implants could reach $169 billion, more than 35 times the amount proposed by Dow Corning. "[V]ery conservative estimates project total expenditures of $133 to $169 billion for effective monitoring, management and rehabilitation of breast implant recipients residing in the United States. ... These conservative numbers just cover medical procedures."
"Because these amounts could double or triple if worst-case scenarios hold true and become compounded by inflation, any demands seeking dollar for dollar compensation could consume the corporate assets of every manufacturer without achieving the restitution desired," he added.
Anderson said the proposed $4.85 billion settlement "amounts to little more than sanctioning the evasion of corporate responsibility." He noted that liability insurance coverage could "permit a manufacturer who has marketed a million of these devices to escape with in-house costs of 200 million dollars which represents little more than a 0.1 cent to the dollar solution that can only be offset by a continuous drain on the public coffers."
The entire premise of the settlement proposal "seems based more upon the dollar amounts that manufacturers are willing to pay to put this problem behind them than fairly compensating the medical costs that implant failures will impose upon patients, third-party payers and American taxpayers over the next 30 to 40 years," Anderson wrote.
- Ben Lilliston