$10.5 Million FTCA Settlement for Veteran Who Lost Kidney Function After VA Prescribed Harmful Drug for Three Years

Matthew Rossignol served his country as a combat veteran and came home to a routine of annual physicals at the Harry S. Truman Memorial Veterans Hospital in Columbia, Missouri. Beginning in May 2015, when he was 35, VA physicians started him on a 90-day course of Naproxen, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug, to manage pain. What should have been a short-term prescription stretched into a three-year course of treatment.

The problem was documented in Rossignol's own VA chart. Alerts and warnings telling providers not to prescribe NSAIDs to this patient had been present since 2012, when lab work first showed elevated creatinine levels and reduced kidney function. Despite those flags, prescriptions continued through 2018. Over that window his estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), the standard measure of kidney function, dropped from 72.7 to 4.1. His creatinine climbed to 13.59, far above the normal range. By January 2019 he was in acute renal failure.

Rossignol then spent nearly two years on dialysis. In September 2021 he received a kidney transplant. Because his underlying condition was so severely worsened by the years of NSAID exposure, his physicians told him he would likely require additional transplants over his lifetime. Prior to the VA's prescribing error, experts concluded he most likely would not have needed dialysis for at least another 20 to 30 years.

National Trial Law attorneys Laurie Higginbotham and Steven Haspel filed suit under the Federal Tort Claims Act in December 2021, naming the United States as defendant. The case was assigned to U.S. District Judge Nanette K. Laughrey in the Western District of Missouri. The government settled for $10.5 million on February 1, 2023. The payment was structured as a $5 million lump sum combined with a $5.5 million reversionary annuity, giving Rossignol greater flexibility in funding his ongoing medical care.

The $10.5 million figure is the largest FTCA settlement on record in Missouri and ranked seventh among all pre-trial FTCA settlements nationally at the time it was reached. Rossignol was 42 years old at the time of the settlement.