Opinion ID: 2632709
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: remedy by due course of law

Text: ¶ 43 This court has analyzed section 11 claims using a balancing approach. Berry ex rel. Berry v. Beech Aircraft Corp., 717 P.2d 670, 683 (Utah 1985). In Berry, as we later explained, we determined that legislative attempts to abrogate section 11 rights should be closely examined by this Court and struck down when the disability they seek to impose on individual rights is too great to be justified by the benefits accomplished or when the legislation is simply an arbitrary and impermissible shifting of collective burdens to individual citizens. Condemarin v. Univ. Hosp., 775 P.2d 348, 358 (Utah 1989). ¶ 44 The collective burden this statue imposes on individual citizens is significant. To be clear about the nature of the capped damages at issue, noneconomic damages are real; they are intended to compensate victims of negligence for such things as chronic pain, disfigurement, and (as in this case) the loss of a normal life. The suggestion that they are somehow soft damages, or less quantifiable than economic damages, is, in my view, a red herring. Projected earnings and costs of future treatment and care, to name two typical elements of economic damages, are by no means exempt from uncertainty and the need for guesswork by juries (who regularly hear extensively from competing experts on these questions). Once one acknowledges the fact that noneconomic damages, fully as much as economic ones, are truly compensatory, not extras or freebies, for individual injured plaintiffs, the degree of the legislature's invasion of an individual's right under section 11 to a remedy is apparent. ¶ 45 Furthermore, I regard as extremely problematic the majority's wholesale acceptance of the rationale that, because damage awards for noneconomic damages are unpredictable, they are more acceptable targets for legislative diminution or destruction. The unpredictability of a jury's determination of the value of all losses, including noneconomic losses, has been, from the earliest beginnings of our tort system, an essential part of the deterrent function of tort law. One need go no further than the Ford Pinto case, where the evidence disclosed that Ford Motor had actually calibrated the relative costs of fixing its defective cars versus paying a few adverse verdicts  and opted to pay the verdicts  to be confronted with the flaw in the predictability argument. Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Co., 119 Cal.App.3d 757, 174 Cal.Rptr. 348, 360-62 (Ct.App.1981). ¶ 46 Lastly, the majority opinion takes insufficient account, I believe, of the arbitrary method by which the statute distributes the cost of its solution to the so-called malpractice crisis. The most seriously harmed plaintiff is likely to receive the smallest fraction of his or her actual damages, while the less injured are likely to receive much higher, or even total, compensation for the injuries they suffer. A more graphic illustration of the impermissible shifting of collective burdens to individual citizens, Condemarin, 775 P.2d at 358, is hard to imagine, and it is the most vulnerable and voiceless citizens who bear the brunt of this shift. ¶ 47 Against this extreme cost to the few victims whose injuries and suffering are severe and perhaps (as with this plaintiff) lifelong is to be considered the legislature's rationale for inflicting such damage on individual rights. The majority defers entirely to the legislature's fact-finding process and cites rather extensively to specific sources supporting the legislature's conclusions that high jury verdicts are the major cause of high medical malpractice premiums. This conclusion is entirely inconsistent with Utah's long experience with juries in these cases. Utah juries are demonstrably reluctant to award high pain and suffering awards. In fact, according to the most recent statistics from the National Practitioner Data Bank, Utah ranks fiftieth among all the states and the District of Columbia in the median size of verdicts awarded in malpractice cases. This fact undermines the notion that jury verdicts have anything to do with premiums in this state. N.P.D.B. Ann. Rep. tbl.9 (2002), available at http://www. npdb-hipdb.com/pubs/stats/2002_NPDB_Annual Report.pdf. While we owe deference to legislative judgments on policy questions generally, we do not grant immunity to constitutional review on the basis of legislative assertions of fact that have no demonstrated basis in reality. No one would claim, for example, that if the legislature determined, contrary to well-established scientific evidence, that childhood vaccinations caused autism, it could properly impose negligence liability on medical practitioners administering the vaccines. ¶ 48 In addition to its uncritical acceptance of the legislature's perception that high jury verdicts in Utah are the cause of the problem this statute purports to address, the majority fails to acknowledge the numerous recent studies attributing rises in insurance premiums to phenomena within the insurance industry itself, rather than to the size of jury verdicts. See app. A. Discussing his landmark Harvard study on medical malpractice, Paul Weiler notes the critical limitations of available evidence in determining the relationship between medical malpractice litigation and insurance premiums and the inherent unfairness and high social cost of damage caps as a response in the absence of any showing of their effectiveness. Paul Weiler, Medical Malpractice on Trial 7-16, 56-61 (1991); see also Thomas B. Metzloff, Understanding the Malpractice Wars, 106 Harv. L.Rev. 1169, 1177-87 (1993) (book review). Weiler's New York-based study was reproduced in Utah and Colorado with significantly similar results. David M. Studdert & Troyen A. Brennan, Beyond Dead Reckoning: Measures of Medical Injury Burden, Malpractice Litigation, and Alternative Compensation Models from Utah and Colorado 33 Ind. L.Rev. 1643, 1677 (2000). Another author points out that emerging data severely undermine the traditional view of the causes of the so-called medical malpractice crisis: As much as the [traditional] hypothesis concerning the roots of the malpractice crisis makes intuitive sense, recent studies have shown that it is simply not accurate. Rather, these studies (discussed below) demonstrate that it is the economy, and not an increase in litigation, which accounts for the various malpractice crises. However, these studies go further and attack the traditional perspective as rhetoric propagated by the insurance industry and foisted upon the medical community and public as an excuse for skyrocketing rates.... These studies, performed by a coalition of nearly 100 consumer groups around the country entitled Americans for Insurance Reform (AIR), are perhaps most surprising for their conclusion that there has historically been no relation between malpractice payouts and premiums. Contrary to the cause and effect supposition discussed above, the AIR studies found that over the past thirty years, the amount that medical malpractice insurers have paid out (including jury awards as well as settlements) directly tracks the rate of medical inflation. Thus, despite the alarms rung as a result of the breakdown of the traditional doctor-patient relationship and the increased media attention paid to medical mistakes and jury verdicts, this has not translated to a resulting explosion in payouts to medical malpractice claimants. Premiums, the studies found, are a different story. Rather than correspond to payouts, they rise and fall in direct relation to the state of the economy. More specifically, premiums rise when interest rates fall. Examining the two prior malpractice crises (which occurred in the mid 1970s and mid 1980s respectively), the studies found that the crises occurred during years of a weakened economy and falling interest rates. Although each crisis brought attempts at malpractice reform in many states, it only subsided when the economy finally recovered and interest rates rose.[ [2] ] Mitchell J. Nathanson, It's the Economy (and Combined Ratio), Stupid: Examining the Medical Malpractice Litigation Crisis Myth and the Factors Critical to Reform, 108 Penn. St. L.Rev. 1077, 1081-82 (2004). ¶ 49 Given the extensive debate and the lack of empirical or expert consensus on the cause of increasing insurance costs, the legislature, however persuaded it may be by one set of assertions, may not properly deprive individual victims of their constitutional right to receive jury-determined compensation for their losses in the absence of overwhelming evidence that the public interest can only be protected by the deprivation. Such a state of affairs currently does not exist; indeed, many thoughtful experts have propounded numerous responses to the situation that would involve no infringement of constitutional rights of citizens. See, e.g., Weiler, supra, at 93-161; see also sources referenced in appendix B. The insistence of our past jurisprudence in this area that the legislature provide some substitute remedy, some quid pro quo, speaks to the high burden borne by those who seek to justify a statute like this. That burden has not been met here. In essence, the majority concludes that the constitutional rights at issue here are so negligible that any reasonable need identified by the legislature is sufficient to permit their destruction. I disagree. As we said in Berry, the basic purpose of article I, section 11 is to impose some limitation on that power for the benefit of those persons who are injured in their persons, property, or reputations since they are generally isolated in society, belong to no identifiable group, and rarely are able to rally the political process to their aid. 717 P.2d at 676.