Dennis Quaid is calling on the U.S. government to preserve patients’ rights to sue drugmakers for injuries.

The actor’s twin babies had to fight for their lives last year when they were mistakenly given a near-fatal overdose of blood thinner Heparin, and Quaid insists the mishap could have been avoided if there was a better system of marking medicines.

California regulators fined hospital bosses $25,000 after concluding the failure of staff at Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to follow their own procedures resulted in incorrect doses of the drug being administered to Quaid’s infants and other children.

Quaid and his wife Kimberly Buffington have sued Baxter International Inc, the maker of the blood-thinning drug given to his twins
On Wednesday, Quaid said victims of harm from medicines should be able to seek damages from manufacturers in state courts.

He says, “I believe if preemption of lawsuits is allowed to prevail, it will basically make all of us, the public, uninformed and uncompensated lab rats.”

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Acting has cost Dennis Quaid his title as the world’s top celebrity golfer – he thinks Samuel L. Jackson deserves the crown.

The Rookie star admits he likes to play a round of golf daily when he isn’t working on a film, but he has been so busy on sets since the golfing world crowned him the best celebrity on the circuit, he fears his game isn’t what it used to be.

He tells Outside’s Go magazine, “I was a scratch golfer two years ago for about 30 minutes. Then I got a job and worked for about an entire year straight. In order to be good, you have to be there five days a week.”

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Professor Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid) might be imperiously brilliant, monumentally self-possessed and an intellectual giant — but when it comes to solving the conundrums of love and family, he’s as downright flummoxed as the next guy. His teenaged daughter (Ellen Page) is an acid-tongued overachiever who follows all too closely in dad’s misery-loving footsteps, and his adopted, preposterously ne’er-do-well brother (Thomas Haden Chuch) has perfected the art of freeloading. A widower who can’t seem to find passion in anything anymore, not even the Victorian Literature in which he’s an expert, it seems Lawrence is sleepwalking through a very stunted middle age. When his brother shows up unexpectedly for an extended stay at just about the same time as he accidentally encounters his former student Janet (Sarah Jessica Parker), the circumstances cause him to stir from his deep, deep freeze, with often comical, sometimes heartbreaking, consequences for himself and everyone around him.

Not the most flattering picture of SJP, if you ask me.

I think this movie looks AMAZING!!! Check out the trailer.

Can’t see the video? Try this link.

More pictures of Sarah Jessica Parker and Dennis Quaid after the jump! (more…)

Dennis Quaid is seen in Washington DC as he enters to speak to the 2008 Annual Health Journalism Conference.

Dennis Quaid’s twins were recent victims of medical negligence. His 16 year-old son with Meg Ryan, Jack, tagged along.

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Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the hospital that gave an overdose of blood thinner to three infants, including the twins of actor Dennis Quaid, has been fined $25,000.

TMZ is reporting that after an investigation, the California Department of Public Health found that hospital personnel failed to follow their own procedures for safe medication use, and that resulted in what they called “preventable medication errors.”

Back in November, the Quaids’ then 10 day old twin newborns, Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace, were given an overdose of the drug, Heparin.

According to Cedars, a total of three babies were given doses of 10,000 or more units per mililiter of the drug.

The normal dosage is 10 units.

Hospital officials said the children affected were all treated and did not show any lasting ill effects from the overdose. In December, Quaid and his wife, Kimberly Buffington, sued Baxter Healthcare, claiming the drug company failed to change the medication’s labels to prevent confusion over dosages.

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Having each lived through a parent’s worst nightmare, Dennis Quaid and his wife, Kimberly, are speaking out again about the medical errors that nearly took the lives of their newborn twins – this time for a national television audience.

“[Mix-ups] happen in every hospital in every state in this country and … I’ve come to find out, there’s 100,000 people a year killed … in hospitals by a medical mistakes,” the actor, 53, tells 60 Minutes in a segment scheduled to air Sunday, CBS reports.

“It’s bigger than AIDS. It’s bigger than breast cancer. It’s bigger than automobile accidents and yet, no one seems to be really aware of the problem,” says Qauid, who also details the ordeal he and his wife experienced.

Last November, Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace Quaid – who were hospitalized due to a suspected infection – nearly died at Los Angeles’s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after mistakenly being given a massive overdose of the drug Heparin, an adult-strength blood thinner, rather than Hep-tock, a much-weaker version of the drug routinely given to clear IV lines in pediatric patients.

“Our kids are bleeding from everyplace that they’ve punctured,” says Quaid. “They were working on Boone, whose belly button would not stop bleeding – blood squirted across the room. It was blood everywhere. It was a life-and-death situation.” (Last month, Quaid said the babies are now doing fine.)

The vials Hep-lock and Heparin looked similar, contend the Quaids, who are suing manufacturer Baxter International. A parallel incident in Indiana resulted in three infant fatalities and for Baxter to re-label its vials and issue a warning to hospitals.

“After these three kids died in Indiana, they did not issue a recall,” says Quaid, noting that toasters and trucks are routinely recalled. “They recall dog food that came from China last year. But they don’t recall medicine that kills people if you give it in the wrong dosage. We think it’s wrong.”

Debra Bello, a senior director at Baxter, tells 60 Minutes that her company did not issue a recall, “Because the product was safe and effective, and the errors, as the hospital has acknowledged, were preventable and due to failures in their system.”

Quaid is now establishing a foundation to look into preventative measures within the medical system. “We all have this inherent thing that we trust doctors and nurses, that they know what they’re doing. This mistake occurred right under our noses,” he says. “The nurse didn’t bother to look at the dosage on the bottle. It was avoidable, completely avoidable.”

Dennis Quaid leaving ABC Studios after appearing on ‘Live with Regis and Kelly’ in New York City, yesterday.

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