If anyone has read the (.pdf) book written by Kenneth Liegnar who is an LLMD - the claims in this case were identified YEARS ago. I can't believe it's taken this long to go after these guys.
This is a different suit than that which was filed by Frmr CT Senator Blumenthal, which failed simply because they did not have a more scientific basis for the claims. As a result of that settlement, IDSA agreed to form a panel to review their guidelines and low-and-behold, decided it was fine and there was no need to amend it. This is almost laughable if it wasn't destroying so many lives.
Then the IDSA guidelines were removed from the National Guidelines Clearinghouse for noncompliance issues, which basically is the index for all medical treatment info. ILADS was then included and are currently the only Lyme guidelines in the database.
Among the allegations:
" In the 1990s, the Insurance Defendants decided that treatment of Lyme disease was too expensive and “red-flagged” Lyme disease. The health insurance industry made a concerted effort to deny coverage for treatment of Lyme disease. The Insurance Defendants enlisted the help of doctors who were researching, not treating, Lyme disease.
The Insurance Defendants paid these IDSA Panelists large fees and together they developed arbitrary guidelines for testing Lyme disease. Once these arbitrary guidelines were decided, the Insurance Defendants could, and did, deny coverage for patients if they did not meet their new stringent Lyme testing protocols.
Since most Lyme patients would not test positive under the new protocols, the Insurance Defendants could deny coverage for many people suffering from Lyme disease. Additionally, the Insurance Defendants, with the help of the paid IDSA Panelists, decided that long term antibiotic treatment was not necessary and all Lyme disease patients could be cured in less than a month. By August of 1992, the Insurance Defendants had imposed an intravenous antibiotic limit of twenty-eight days.
By the mid 1990’s, the Insurance Defendants began
paying large consulting fees to the same Lyme IDSA Panelists who helped them develop their arbitrary guidelines. The Insurance Case 5:17-cv-00190-RWS Document 1 Filed 11/10/17 Page 10 of 53 PageID #: 10 11 Defendants paid these Lyme IDSA Panelists to enforce their new stringent testing protocols and maintain the 28-day treatment requirement. These doctors began publishing papers on the “Lyme hysteria” and the “Pseudo Lyme” problem. "
The lawsuit names a number of medical doctors, all representatives of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. Among them are:
"
Dr. Gary P. Wormser, Dr. Raymond J. Dattwyler, Dr. Eugene Shapiro, Dr. John J. Halperin, Dr. Robert B. Nadelman, Dr. Leonard Sigal, and many others were paid large sums of money by the Insurance Defendants in consulting fees, in expert witness fees, and to review, and deny, insurance coverage claims related to Lyme disease. "This new lawsuit is not the first antitrust suit filed against the Infectious Diseases Society of America. In 2006, the Office of the Connecticut Attorney General filed an antitrust investigation to determine whether conflicts of interest may have affected the development of the IDSA’s clinical practice guidelines for Lyme disease. Findings of that investigation determined in 2008 that:
" “significant procedural deficiencies related to the IDSA’s development of its 2006 Guidelines” and found that the panel and the IDSA failed to ensure that the guideline development comported with due process, as required by antitrust law when persons (or their association) involved in standard setting have an economic interest in the outcome. In particular, the AG said the panel “improperly ignored or minimized consideration of alternative medical opinion and evidence regarding chronic Lyme disease, potentially raising serious questions about
whether the recommendations reflected all relevant science.” "
-p
Post Edited (Pirouette) : 11/15/2017 9:41:36 PM (GMT-7)