According to an exclusive report coming out of Bloomberg, Medtronic, the world’s largest maker of electronic heart devices, has agreed to pay more than $75 million to settle lawsuits claiming it hid defects in its defibrillators.

Medtronic has been facing approximately 2,000 claims over battery defects in the defibrillators which are potentially fatal and had tried to keep the settlement confidential. The corporation, however, did reserve the right to pull out of the agreement if 90% of claimants did accept it.

In the past Medtronic recalled 87,000 defibrillators because of battery failures – but said that no deaths were linked to any failures of the devices. Plaintiff lawyers contend that Medtronic officials, despite know of the defects, continued selling flawed products for two years after learning in 2003 about the battery-failure glitches.

Commentary: Medtronic is hardly the only company having trouble with defibrillators however. Guidant (now owned by Boston Scientific) did a 2005 recall of over 100,000 defibrillators (and like Medtronic, the plaintiff bar is arguing that the company knew of the defects but hid them to protect sales – but unlike Medtronic, the Guidant defibrillators were linked to at least seven deaths). Just two weeks ago, Guidant agreed to pay $195 million to settle roughly 4,000 claims (which probably set the dollar range and motivation behind this similar settlement). The third-largest heart device maker, St. Jude, also conducted a monster recall of 75,000 defibrillators in 2005.

Care to know an interesting (and spooky) thought? The St. Jude recall was in part due to battery failures resulting from interference from cosmic rays!!! Better call Dr. Spock.