The Missouri Organization of Defense Lawyers and the Missouri Hospital Association have filed an amicus brief with the Missouri Supreme Court in a Jackson County case involving a woman whose $1,030,000 jury award was limited to $778,828 after the trial court applied the state’s medical liability statute.
Maria Ordinola Velazquez v. University Physician Associates and the State of Missouri challenges the constitutionality of the medical liability statute and its non-economic damages limits.
“If the plaintiffs are right and you can't abolish this and re-enact the statutory claim, then that means that all the workers' compensation laws we've had in place since the 1930s are invalid,” said St. Louis attorney John Reeves who wrote the amicus brief. “Those laws abolish any negligence cause of action that a worker may have against his employer and submit in place the no-fault workers' compensation claim.”
Senate Bill 239, signed into law in 2015, established limits on the amount of non-economic damages recoverable by a plaintiff in a medical malpractice action, including $400,000 for non-catastrophic and $700,000 for catastrophic injuries, according to the Missouri Department of Insurance.
“If the Missouri Supreme Court cannot put statutory caps in this context where they abolish the medical malpractice common law claim and replace it with the statutory claim and if the General Assembly cannot put caps on that, you're basically saying the General Assembly can't abolish, re-enact, and modify causes of action at all, which is just not what the law has been ever,” Reeves told the St. Louis Record.
Velazquez sued University Physician Associates and the State of Missouri, alleging medical negligence related to a cesarean section and post-procedure care.
Velazquez, through her attorneys, is arguing that the limits on noneconomic damages are a violation of the Missouri Constitution, which guarantees the right to a jury trial.
“This goes far beyond tort reform,” Reeves said. “This goes to the authority of the Missouri General Assembly to basically enact laws and create modified causes of action to begin with.”
The three major points in the amicus brief include the following.
The legislature must have the authority if they have the authority to abolish a common-law cause of action.
“The legislature abolished the common law cause of action, enacted a statutory claim, and said since you can limit the caps on the statutory cause of action, you should be able to limit the caps here,” Reeves said. “The issue, in this case, is whether the legislature is permitted to do this. The plaintiffs are saying no because it interferes with the right to a jury trial and we’re saying no, it doesn’t.”
If the legislature doesn’t have the authority, then it necessarily means the legislature didn't have the authority to enact the workers' compensation statute.
“There's no difference between abolishing negligence and enacting the workers' compensation scheme and abolishing a medical malpractice common law claim and reenacting a statutory claim with a limit on the non-economic damages available,” Reeves said. “You can't have one without the other.”
The right to a jury trial does not mean that the legislature can not say what the legal consequences of the jury's findings will be.
“Wrongful death isn't a common-law cause of action and wrongful death didn't exist in the common law,” Reeves added. “It’s a cause of action that was created by statute some 80 years ago and the Missouri Supreme court, to their credit, upheld that and since that wasn't part of the right to a jury trial, then the legislature can limit caps on wrongful death causes of action.”