Forbes -- Congressional mischief comes in large packages, like health care reform, and in small bundles, like the ill-advised Medical Device Safety Act of 2009 (MDSA) which is now moving forward in both the House and Senate. This short bill will overrule, retroactively for all pending cases, the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in Riegel v. Medtronic, Inc., whichheld that a specific statutory provision in the 1976 Medical Device Act explicitly blocked (or “expressly preempted” in technical jargon) state courts from allowing personal injury litigation to attack any device’s design or warnings to which the FDA has given, after exhaustive inspection, its pre-market approval.
