Class action in medical waste disposal case OK’d

Wednesday, June 5, 2002 | 10:59 a.m.

A federal judge ruled Monday that up to 2,500 doctor's offices and other medical operations in Las Vegas can sue as a class to challenge what critics call monopoly tactics in the collection of their medical waste by Republic Silver State Disposal Inc.

A lawsuit filed by Nevada Heart Consultants alleges Republic's fees for disposing medical waste -- which the company does through a subsidiary called Environmental Technologies Inc. -- have been in excess of rates set in municipal and county codes since 1990.

The suit also questioned whether a franchise awarded by the city of Las Vegas to Republic gives the company the right to charge extra fees for picking up medical waste.

Senior U.S. District Judge Justin Quackenbush, in Monday's ruling, approved a potential class of plaintiffs who paid for medical waste collection and disposal between 1991 and 2001. He said there is "clear justification for handling this dispute on a representative rather than an individual basis."

"Members of the putative class were all charged more for their medical waste than for their ordinary trash and more than set forth by Las Vegas ordinances for the removal of trash," Quackenbush wrote. "All class members share a common interest in whether these overcharges for medical waste are legal."

"This case involves multiple claims for relatively small individual sums. If plaintiffs cannot proceed as a class, some -- perhaps most -- will be unable to proceed as individuals because of the disparity between their litigation costs and what they hope to recover," he wrote.

Nevada Heart Consultants, its owner Dr. Zev Lagstein and two other Las Vegas doctors, Sundar Raj and Woodrow Wagner, allege in lawsuits that Republic has committed fraud, breach of contract and has violated federal and state racketeering statutes.

But Republic challenged the plaintiffs' allegations, saying their lawsuit is a "transparent attempt to force local governments to deregulate medical waste collection by bypassing the political process and using the courts to settle a public policy dispute."