By ALLISON HOFFMAN
April 8, 2008
Marine captain who is on his third tour in Iraq was awarded $3.5 million in punitive damages Tuesday from a servicemembers’ insurance company for water damage to his house.
Capt. John Colombero already won $50,000 in damages for emotional distress last week after his lawyers argued that he spent time between deployments arguing with his insurance company, USAA. The insurer had denied a 2004 claim for $84,744 in damage to his house in Oceanside, south of the Marine Corps’ Camp Pendleton.
Colombero’s father said financial uncertainty and paperwork associated with the insurance claim and lawsuit took their toll on his son.
“The Marines don’t give you much flexibility, so he had to take care of the documents and then worry about his deployment too,” John Colombero, Sr., said in an interview. “He’d get up at 4:30 in the morning and come home at 10:30 at night and then have to deal with this.”
USAA spokesman Roger Wildermuth defended the company’s work and said the insurer plans to appeal the damages.
Jurors indicated on court forms that the punitive award was intended to punish USAA for malice, oppression and fraudulent conduct, said Ricardo Echeverria, Colombero’s lawyer.
An insurance litigation analyst said the damages would likely be reduced.
“I say ‘wow’ because it’s really an amazing jump to get from the initial award to those punitive damages,” said David Rossmiller, managing editor of the Insurance Coverage Law Blog. “It absolutely plays into people’s minds, that he’s a Marine. Would they have given the same award to somebody else? Maybe not.”
USAA, a private company based in San Antonio, provides insurance and financial services to 5.6 million servicemembers and their families.
Colombero, 34, originally of San Jose, bought his three-bedroom house for $352,000 in 2002 and rented out the spare bedrooms to make his payments. In 2004, after he returned from a tour in Baghdad, Colombero decided to build an addition. A pipe burst during construction, damaging the foundation.
Colombero, who testified before he deployed again March 20, heard about the verdict when he made on a phone call to his fiancee, Kimberly Collins, from Iraq.
“We were in there with the jurors, so I put him on speakerphone and he thanked them for their service,” Collins said. “Then I took him off speakerphone and told him they just gave him $3.5 million, and he just said, ‘Oh my God.’”
Vittorio Hernandez - AHN News Writer
Sacramento, CA (AHN) - A study released Tuesday reported growing profitability of the nursing home industry, but declining health care quality.
Researchers from the University of California San Francisco found out that two years after the state passed legislation increasing reimbursements from Medi-Cal, average nursing home income from the state’s healthcare program went up to $152 from $124 daily.
The same study discovered 16 percent of nursing homes in the state failed to measure up to California’s minimum staffing benchmarks. A minimal rise in average salary for nursing assistants by less than one dollar was not sufficient to cover inflation rate increases. Even higher-paid nurses had a fast turnover rate, with 7 in 10 resigning from their jobs in 2006.
But average spending on direct patient care went down by 3.6 percent, while complaints of patient mistreatment proven went up by 36 percent.
Charlene Harrington, the lead author of the study, wrote as her comment, quoted by the Los Angeles Times, “They got so much money, they should have been able to do something.”
Betsy Hite, spokeswoman for the California Association of Health Facilities, said it was too early to judge the nursing homes. She admitted the legislation turned around the association members’ finances, but would prefer true accounting of funds received from the Medi-Cal to be done closer to 2009.
Meanwhile, United Way, a charitable organization which funds nursing homes, soup kitchens and other social service providers, reported difficulty in raising funds. Carol McCormack, president of United Way Mesa, attributed the decline in donations to the slump in the housing industry since architects, engineers, real estate agents and construction workers form the bulk of the group’s major donors. The shortfall in fund raising this year was $350,000, McCormack told the San Francisco Examiner.