Good Samaritan $100 Million Lawsuit Gains National Media Coverage
More details emerge...
After we posted a short write-up yesterday detailing the $100 million wrongful death lawsuit filed against Good Samaritan Hospital here in Corvallis, the story grabbed national headlines today…front-page national headlines.
(family submitted photo)
After the Inquirer’s post, OregonLive picked up the story. OregonLive is an affiliated website of The Oregonian, the largest news publication in the state. OregonLive’s coverage then caught the attention of The Daily Mail. The Daily Mail is a British-born publication that operates a U.S. section on its website. It is ranked among the top 10 news sources in the U.S., drawing more than 94 million active monthly readers. Other national media outlets then picked up the story and fed it to their affiliates, including MSN.
The $100 million wrongful death lawsuit filed against Good Samaritan Medical Center here in Corvallis continued to draw national attention today, after coverage from the Daily Mail and other major outlets.
The lawsuit centers around the death of 18-year-old Ethan Cantrell of Alsea following treatment for a logging-related injury. According to the Daily Mail article, the lawsuit alleges hospital staff failed to properly identify and remove debris embedded in Cantrell’s leg wound after the accident.
The legal filing claims medics did not perform CT scans that may have revealed the debris lodged inside the injury, and also failed to administer the full range of antibiotics that could have potentially saved his life. The Daily Mail further reported that Cantrell was later transferred to a second hospital, where surgeons attempted to save him by amputating his arm at the shoulder. He reportedly died five days later.
“It’s just a sad, sad case,” attorney Brent Barton, representing Cantrell’s estate, told the Daily Mail.
The case has now spread beyond Corvallis, gaining traction across national and international news platforms. The case has now been entered into the Benton County court system, as we reported yesterday.
The lawsuit accuses multiple parties of negligence, including Good Samaritan, two physicians involved in the treatment, and the emergency medical group associated with the hospital’s ER operations, which we believe is Mary’s Peak Emergency Physicians.
The Mary’s Peak Emergency Physicians website list “anesthesiology” on their homepage. Anesthesiologists and anesthesia providers commonly administer antibiotics in the operating room to prevent surgical site infections.
A reader wrote into us yesterday after the post with this comment:
“I think it’s really interesting that the family is chosing to seek legal action against the medical care vs the employer. Why did he get so severely injured in the first place you know what I mean?
I don’t know if these types of cases discuss the proof openly, but I’m assuming that the doctors at OHSU would have noticed the agregious amount of debris the family claimed remained in the wound. But if there isn’t proof that the wound was not cleaned well, this might just be a case of a tragic death and the grief of a family “lashing out legally” so to say. I think it’s not uncommon for tragic deaths to try to find “justice” any way they can.”
There is also the question of who ultimately pays if liability is found. Practitioners and hospitals carry insurance, so how much do they actually pay out directly? Do insurance rates then increase, similar to auto insurance? And if so, are those higher costs eventually passed on to the public through the price of medical care?
Story developing…
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