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The Laches Defense not Available in Medical Malpractice Actions

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By Alex Stein

The DC Court of Appeals has ruled last week that the laches defense does not apply in actions for medical malpractice: Naccache v. Taylor, — A.3d —-, 2013 WL 3820942 (D.C. 2013). The Court reasoned that laches is only available in equity proceedings but not in actions at law. For actions at law, held the Court, the applicable time bars are set by the statute of limitations. This statute, the Court explained, accounts for all relevant tradeoffs between plaintiffs’ and defendants’ interests. Hence, “To import laches as a defense to actions at law would [improperly] pit the legislative value judgment embodied in a statute of limitations … against the equitable determinations of individual judges.” In making this ruling, the Court also took notice of the fact that forty-eight states bar laches as a defense for actions at law.

This ruling appears impeccable, but it has a wrinkle. Read More

The Merit of Merit Affidavits

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By Alex Stein

Similar to many other states, Oklahoma has a statute prescribing that suits alleging medical malpractice must be verified by an affidavit from a qualified medical expert. Suits unaccompanied by a proper affidavit must be stricken out. This statute is part of what I call – and commend – as a procedural tort reform: it allows courts to get rid of unmeritorious suits against doctors and hospitals early in the process. The statute, however, recently became a dead letter after being pronounced unconstitutional by Oklahoma’s Supreme Court for the second time in a row (Wall v. Marouk, — P.3d —-, 2013 WL 2407160 (Okla. 2013)). Evidently, this Court does not view merit affidavits as favorably as I do.  Let’s see why. Read More

Proximate Cause in Georgia

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By Alex Stein

Two days ago, Georgia’s Court of Appeals decided Georgia Clinic v. Stout, — S.E.2d —-, 2013 WL 3497703 (Ga. App. 2013).

This tragic case features an elderly patient with an arthritic knee. Her doctors injected that knee with medication drawn from a multi-dose vial. They did so at their clinic under non-sterile conditions that included poor infection controls, failure to maintain sterile field, and poor hand-washing facilities (the clinic had no sinks and alcohol hand cleaners in the examination rooms). As a result, the patient’s knee was infected with methicillin-sensitive staphylococcus aureus (“MSSA”). Four other patients of the same clinic were also infected with MSSA from the same multi-dose vial.

The patient developed excruciating pain in her knee and became depressed. The doctors treated her for the pain in the knee but neglected the depression. They failed to refer the patient to a psychiatrist. After a short period of time, the patient committed suicide by jumping from the window of her 14th floor apartment. She left behind a suicide note saying that she can’t take her pain anymore and prefers to die. Read More

A New Trend? Hospital Successfully Sues its Patient’s Attorneys for Filing a Vexatious Malpractice Suit

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By Alex Stein

Connecticut’s Appellate Court ruled in yesterday’s decision that hospitals and doctors can successfully sue their patients’ attorneys for filing a vexatious malpractice suit. The Court also ruled that the trial judge’s decision that the patient’s suit was vexatious will often create an estoppel against the attorney. The attorney will consequently be precluded from contesting that decision. The only issue will then be the amount of damages—double or treble—that the attorney and her firm will be obligated to pay the hospital or the doctor.  See Charlotte Hungerford Hospital v. Creed — A.3d —-, 2013 WL 3378824 (Conn. App. 2013).

Whether this is going to be a trend in our medical malpractice law remains to be seen. In the meantime, I provide the details of that important decision. Read More

Governmental immunity for EMTs

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By Alex Stein

According to the recent New York Court of Appeals’ decision—Applewhite v. Accuhealth, Inc., 2013 WL 3185185 (N.Y. 2013)—governmental immunity is a starting point for any inquiry into EMTs’ liability for malpractice.

The Court based this immunity on the famous “duty to all is duty to none” principle: in providing a vital emergency service to public in general, EMTs function in a governmental capacity and owe no duty to any specific individual. The Court explained that EMTs differ from the regular providers of medical care—doctors and nurses, who are subject to stringent licensing requirements and must have extensive educational and training credentials—in that they provide only emergency medical stabilization in Basic (as opposed to Advanced) Life Support ambulances. EMTs are also funded and remunerated differently from doctors and nurses: they operate on a limited municipal budget that depends on the taxpayers’ money and cannot afford malpractice payouts. Dilution of the EMTs’ budget might limit the municipal emergency response systems to mere transport service—a consequence that society can ill-afford. Read More

Suing Psychiatrists: Causation, Spoliation, Alternative Liability, and Lost Chance

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By Alex Stein

Almonte v. Kurl, 46 A.3d 1 (R.I. 2012), is a must-read malpractice decision. This decision is about a patient who was brought to a psychiatrist for involuntary committal evaluation after undergoing an acute episode.  The psychiatrist examined the patient, but opened no committal process. As a result, the patient was released to commit suicide, apparently with the same gun that he threatened to use in the episode that triggered the evaluation.

The Rhode Island Supreme Court affirmed the trial judge’s determination that the psychiatrist’s failure to open the committal process amounted to malpractice. The psychiatrist was nonetheless able to summarily defeat the wrongful death action filed by the patient’s family.

How could that happen? Read More

Decrease in the patient’s chances to survive held actionable as a standalone damage in Minnesota

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By Alex Stein

On May 31, 2013, the Supreme Court of Minnesota has delivered an immensely important decision: it recognized as actionable a patient’s increased risk of dying resulting from her doctor’s negligent failure to secure timely diagnosis and treatment of cancer. Dickhoff v. Green, — N.W.2d —, 2013 WL 2363550 (Minn. 2013)

This case involved a family physician (the defendant) and her baby patient (the plaintiff). The baby had a lump on her buttock, which the defendant allegedly considered a non-issue for nearly a year. At the 1–year well-baby check, the defendant referred the baby to a specialist, who diagnosed her with alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma (ARS)—a rare and aggressive childhood cancer. The baby subsequently underwent a tumor-removal surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, but remained dangerously ill. Read More

The Tylenol Debate: Can Hospitals be Sued for Excessive Markups on Medications and Devices?

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By Alex Stein

Steven Brill’s TIME MAGAZINE blockbuster article, Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing Us, uncovers the CHARGEMASTER: a publicly undisclosed pricelist accountable for what we see in hospital bills. What we see there doesn’t look good: it includes acetaminophen sold for $1.50 a tablet (you can buy 100 of those for the same price at Amazon); $77 for a box of sterile gauze pads (Amazon’s prices vary between $6 and $11); $18 for a single diabetes test strip (sold for 54 cents by Amazon); $108 for antibacterial Bacitracin ointment (Amazon’s prices vary between $2.50 and $6.50); and so forth. Charges for stay, scans, surgeries, canes, and wheelchairs skyrocket as well.

The American Hospitals Association (AHA) rejects Brill’s analysis. According to AHA, the chargemaster aggregates the hospital’s overall costs on delivering quality care to patients: “In order to take medications in a hospital, even over-the-counter medicines, they must be prescribed by a doctor (a little bit of cost for the doctor), that order gets transmitted to the pharmacy (a little more cost), the order gets filled by a pharmacist or pharmacy tech who retrieves just one Tylenol pill and individually packages that one pill (still more cost), the pill gets transported from the pharmacy to the nursing unit where the patient resides (a little more cost), then the pill is retrieved by a registered nurse who personally gives the pill to the patient and then must document the administration of that pill in the patient medication administration record (a little more cost). All of this process to give a patient a single dose of Tylenol in a hospital bed [must also be] in compliance with all pertaining regulations (a little more cost).”

This post will not try to resolve the Tylenol Debate. Nor will it say anything about the government as a plausible substitute for the eccentric chargemaster. Instead, I will raise a legal question: Can patients sue hospitals for excessive markups on medications and devices?

My answer to this question is a qualified YES. Entrepreneurial and business aspects of running a hospital fall under states’ consumer protection laws (Brookins v. Mote, 292 P.3d 347 (Mont. 2012)). Those aspects certainly include billing (Jaramillo v. Morris, 750 P.2d 1301, 1304 (Wash. App. 1988); Ambach v. French, 216 P.3d 405 (Wash. 2009)). The key question here is whether an excessive markup on medications and devices amounts to deceit or an unfair trade practice. If it does, the hospital would be in violation of the relevant state consumer protection law. This might happen to hospitals whose billing practices—to which patients gave no informed consent—are particularly aggressive. Those hospitals might face class action suits and the prospect of paying treble damages. They also may be stripped of the special protections given to defendants in medical malpractice suits (that include shortened limitations and repose periods for filing suits, caps on damages, and charitable immunities). For my account of the competition between medical malpractice and consumer protection rules, click here.

Brill and other participants in the Tylenol Debate call on the government to start regulating hospital prices. My short advice to hospitals: get rid of unconscionable markups forthwith.

Introducing Guest Blogger Alex Stein

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Alex Stein is Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School. Prior to joining Brooklyn Law, Professor Stein was on the faculty at Cardozo (2004–16) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1991–2004). Alex also held visiting professorial appointments at Columbia, Miami, and Yale Law Schools. In Fall 2016, he visited Harvard Law School, where he taught Torts and a seminar on Medical Malpractice. Alex’s specialty areas are Evidence, Medical Malpractice, Torts, and general legal theory. He authors three books, An Analytical Approach to Evidence (with Ronald J. Allen et al.) (6th ed. 2016), Foundations of Evidence Law (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Tort Liability under Uncertainty (Oxford University Press, 2001) (with Ariel Porat), and over sixty articles of which many have appeared in leading journals including Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Northwestern University Law Review, Texas Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review and Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. Alex was one of the founding editors of Theoretical Inquiries in Law. In 2013, he launched an e-journal STEIN on Medical Malpractice that covers all significant developments in medical malpractice laws across the United States and attracts 27,000 visitors every year. He graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned a Ph.D. from the University of London.

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