Guy S. DiMartino at Guy DiMartino Law rides his bike 1000s of miles each year. He has represented victims of bike and trike accidents in Indiana and Florida.
In 2019, there were over 217,396 crashes in Indiana and 3,766 in LaPorte County. Of the 217,000 statewide collisions, 51,000 were rear-end crashes. Rear-end crashes are sometimes called “fender-benders”, but that term doesn’t tell the whole story.
Fractures are common after accident injuries in Michigan City and LaPorte. A broken bone can really hurt. Treatment of broken bones can cost a lot of money, and accident victims can experience permanent problems because of the injury.
When someone first meets with an attorney about a nursing home abuse situation, the attorney will talk to the person about the facts that they know to be true. He will ask if they had registered a complaint with the Department of Health and whether the state had come in and done an investigation.
There are two primary difficult aspects: firstly the age of the resident, because of the bias that they are old anyway, and secondly people generally have a number of medical problems as they get older, so the question becomes whether the issue was caused by the abuse and neglect or was it caused by their other ancillary medical problems – diabetes, heart disease, orthopedic injuries and the fact they could not move, the fact they were overweight, or even their dementia.
There are generally two issues here. Firstly there are a lot of children or a lot of loved ones who are somewhat absent, meaning they are not there all the time and they do not talk with their loved one often. They might see them once a month, once every three months or once every six months, and during that period of time the loved one does not complain to their family.
Nursing home neglect is generally caused by employees who are overworked or in a bad working environment where they do not get paid enough money, and so they become very apathetic. They start allowing a lot of problems to slip through the cracks, which leads to problems with dehydration, problems with malnutrition, and there can also be problems with bedsores or breakdown of the skin.
Interviewer: Do you employ that strategy when you're dealing with insurance companies? Have you found that giving them information completely and faster than other attorneys might help your client in getting more money over that case?