Opinion ID: 770626
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: Factor 6: Avoiding Trial Complexity

Text: 73 The final factor is whether the claim is judicially manageable in terms of avoiding duplicate recoveries and complex apportionment. The District Court found that this case did not present significant problems of duplicate recoveries or complex apportionment, but acknowledged that some apportionment might be required if smokers brought their own claims against the Tobacco Companies. The Hospitals generally agree. They further add that their injuries -- i.e., the costs of providing free health care -- are fundamentally different than the nonpaying patients' injuries -- i.e., the health damages from smoking and the out-of-pocket costs of paying for health care. Thus, the risk of duplicate damage claims is extremely limited. The Tobacco Companies counter that, under Pennsylvania's collateral source rule, nonpaying patients could sue to recover the costs of their medical treatment even if they did not pay for that treatment. Thus, they argue that duplicate recoveries and apportionment are a real concern. 74 The collateral source rule provides that payments from a third-party to a victim will not lower the damages that the victim may recover from a wrongdoer. This rule prevents the wrongdoer from benefitting from the third-party's payments. See Johnson v. Beane, 664 A.2d 96, 100 (Pa. 1995). The application of this rule to a situation where the wrongdoer pays the victim's damages indirectly through a third-party suit is unclear. Steamfitters declined to predict how Pennsylvania courts would rule on this issue, since it did not rely on the invocation of the rule to support its holding. See 171 F.3d at 928 n.9. We follow a similar route. Since this is an issue of state law, and since the indirectness of injury and the speculativeness of damages factors already militate so strongly against a finding of proximate cause, we choose not to address the application of the collateral source rule. Thus, we assume the District Court was correct in finding little risk of duplicate recoveries and complex apportionment. 75      76 The Hospitals' claims satisfy the first three factors. There is a causal connection, the Hospitals allege the Tobacco Companies harbored specific intent to harm, and, at least for the direct injury theory, the Hospitals' injuries are within congressional antitrust concerns. However, these three factors are outweighed, as they were in Steamfitters, by the sheer remoteness of the Hospitals' injuries from the alleged conspiracy. That remoteness is evident in the highly speculative nature of the Hospitals' damages claims. This deficiency is also manifested in the indirectness of the Hospitals' injuries: 77 [t]he sheer number of links in the chain of causation that connect the defendants' suppression of information on the dangers of their products and withholding of safer tobacco products from the market to the [Hospitals'] increased expenditures [are simply too great].... The tortured path that one must follow from the tobacco companies' alleged wrongdoing to the [Hospitals'] increased expenditures demonstrates that the plaintiffs' claims are precisely the type of indirect claims that the proximate cause requirement is intended to weed out. 78 Steamfitters, 171 F.3d at 930. The three distinctions the Hospitals offer -- direct provision of health care, free provision of health care, and a duty to provide health care -- are not significant enough to change the analysis. Steamfitters controls: proximate cause is lacking, and the Hospitals lack standing to assert their antitrust claims.