Opinion ID: 5128872
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Mental Health Treatment Claims

Text: Here, the lawsuits in Scholz I and Scholz II rest on essentially the same facts, so it was not an abuse of discretion for the district court to dismiss Scholz II on claim-splitting grounds. The complaints in each lawsuit begin almost identically. The Scholz I complaint brought a suit under the FTCA for “negligence and professional malpractice in connection with medical care provided to Plaintiff Scholz by the Department of Veterans Affairs at the Tomah [VAMC], the Zablocki [VAMC], and outpatient programs.” The Scholz II amended complaint similarly brought a suit under the FTCA for “negligence and professional malpractice in connection with medical care provided to Plaintiff Scholz by the Department of Veterans Affairs.” More precisely, Counts I (medical negligence), II (pharmacy and oversight negligence), III (negligent failure to obtain informed consent), and V (negligent hiring, training, supervision, and retention) in Scholz II all implicate defendant’s conduct post-2011. Her failure to secure relief for those alleged wrongs in Scholz I—whether for failure to comply with procedural requirements or for lack of merit—does not entitle 20 No. 20-2163 her to “take another bite at the apple.” See Bell, 827 F.3d at 707. Scholz “was obliged to,” but did not, “raise all claims that stem from the same transaction or series of related transactions” in Scholz I. See Nalco, 843 F.3d at 674. Her attempt to now bring claims resting on the same conduct in Scholz II is “a quintessential example of claim splitting in duplicative lawsuits, a litigation tactic that res judicata doctrine is meant to prevent.” Palka, 662 F.3d at 437. We hold claim splitting was thus appropriate. Scholz tries to argue there is “not a gap but a chasm” between Scholz I and Scholz II by characterizing the lawsuits as addressing different conduct at different times. She argues that Scholz I claims concerned the “botched breast surgery treatment at the Zablocki VA[MC] in 2012” which required four corrective surgeries and which Scholz alleged “was improper given Scholz’s physical and mental afflictions following her 2011 mental health treatment at the Tomah VA[MC].” By contrast, Scholz argues, Counts I, II, III, and V in Scholz II concern the alleged “negligent outpatient mental health treatment after Scholz’s discharge from the Tomah VA[MC]”— treatment that “was rendered by different VA employees at the Appleton, Green Bay, and Cleveland VA clinics from 2011 through 2018,” and therefore not from the Tomah VAMC or Zablocki VAMC. Scholz’s creative attempt to bifurcate the basis of her claims in each lawsuit is belied by her repeated positions in Scholz I. The Scholz I complaint was not temporally limited to defendant’s conduct in 2011 and 2012, and so did not exclude the allegedly negligent mental health treatment between 2011 and 2018 that Scholz II highlighted. Indeed, in stating her Scholz I claims for negligence, she broadly asserted that No. 20-2163 21 defendant “negligently supervis[ed] and retain[ed] incompetent, inexperienced, unqualified and/or inadequately trained or supervised operators, administrators, employees, agents and staff and fail[ed] to take timely corrective action,” and also “negligently fail[ed] to ensure that patient treatment records and deficiencies in care were timely communicated to all VAMC health care providers and to the Plaintiff.” None of these claims were temporally limited to defendant’s conduct in 2011–2012 or limited to the conduct by Tomah VAMC and Zablocki VAMC. That the Scholz I claims turned on defendant’s conduct extending until as late as 2018 can be further gleaned from the litigating positions that Scholz took at the summary-judge- ment stage in Scholz I. In responding to the government’s motion for partial summary judgment in November 2018, Scholz invoked a “continuous treatment” theory based on Wisconsin law and maintained, based on her expert witnesses, that she “received continuous negligent mental health treatment during this entire period [from 2008 through early 2017] from VA healthcare providers.” Referencing her SF-95 from Scholz I, Scholz asserted that “the negligent mental health treatment … occur[ed] ‘on or about January 1, 2011 and continu[ed] to the present.’” She added that her experts “independently determined that plaintiff’s negligent mental health treatment continued after her discharge from the Tomah VAMC program.” In her own motion for summary judgment, Scholz re- peated these same arguments. She argued that her treatment after 2012 was a continuation of the negligence that began with the Tomah VAMC mental health treatment and Zablocki VAMC breast surgery. In particular, Scholz recounted that after the surgery she was “on 28 medications” and that she 22 No. 20-2163 continued to “suffer both physically and mentally in the following years.” She noted how the four corrective surgeries occurred in 2012, 2013, and 2014 and left lingering “pain, breast deformities, scarring and lumps, and more mental health issues.” Beyond the surgery complications, the problematic pharmacy practices, too, “did not stop with Plaintiff’s discharge from the Tomah telehealth program in January 2012.” Indeed, Scholz asserted that her treating psychiatrist Dr. Dy continued to (negligently) ignore over twenty-five pharmacy warnings when medicating Scholz until as late as 2018. Likewise, Scholz’s proffer of, and heavy reliance on, the declarations of Dr. Amsel and Dr. Johnson in Scholz I further undercut Scholz’s argument that Scholz I was limited to 2011 conduct. Both experts outlined the case for why defendant acted negligently not only in its performance of Scholz’s breast reduction surgery and the subsequent corrective surgeries but also in its continuing mental and physical health treatment of Scholz until as late as 2018. Dr. Amsel found “evidence of on-going continuous negligent mental health treatment practices affecting the Plaintiff’s treatment during the years 2011 through the present at the Tomah VAMC, Zablocki VAMC, and VA outpatient clinics.” Dr. Johnson similarly opined that “the pharmaceutical treatment rendered to the Plaintiff by the Department of Veteran Affairs commencing during Plaintiff’s treatment at the Tomah VAMC and outpatient clinics during the years 2011 through 2017 … failed to meet the required standard of care of reasonable health care providers and was a cause of injury to” Scholz. Underscoring the identity of claims in the two cases, these declarations were then attached to the Scholz II administrative claims and Scholz II complaint. No. 20-2163 23 In a final attempt to temporally limit the scope of Scholz I to conduct in 2011, Scholz argues the “controlling time” is the “date of the claims,” rather than the “filing of the federal action on August 8, 2016.” The dates of the underlying alleged harms are certainly relevant, but they are in no way dispositive. In fact, “[t]he crucial date is the date the complaint was filed.” Curtis, 226 F.3d at 139. After that crucial date, a plaintiff “has no continuing obligation to file amendments to the complaint to stay abreast of subsequent events,” and “may simply bring a later suit on those later-arising claims.” Id. Here, Scholz filed her Scholz I complaint in 2016, when the bulk of the allegedly negligent treatment had already occurred. Thus, Scholz’s filing timeline obligated her to include those claims at play on this “crucial date.” The Scholz I litigation reveals that Scholz and her experts consistently aimed the Scholz I claims at the government’s alleged negligent conduct that extended into 2018. Accordingly, it is difficult to accept Scholz’s contrary argument now that Scholz I had nothing to do with defendant’s conduct between 2011 and 2018. Beyond temporal arguments, Scholz tries to pin the course of litigation on administrative exhaustion requirements. Scholz argues, as she unsuccessfully argued to the district court, that she had to bring new administrative claims prior to Scholz II in order to seek recovery for the 2011 to 2018 conduct, and that limitation prevented her from bringing those claims in Scholz I. See McNeil v. United States, 508 U.S. 106, 113 (1993) (“The FTCA bars claimants from bringing suit in federal court until they have exhausted their administrative remedies.”); 28 U.S.C. § 2675 (same). In other words, she contends 24 No. 20-2163 that she should not be barred now from bringing claims that she could not have brought in Scholz I. We rejected a similar argument in the different context of § 1983 and Title VII claims in Palka v. City of Chicago, 662 F.3d 428 (7th Cir. 2011). In Palka, the plaintiffs sued under § 1983, then brought a subsequent lawsuit under Title VII, which was dismissed on claim-splitting grounds. Id. at 430, 437–38. On appeal, the plaintiffs argued that “it was impossible for them to preserve their Title VII claims because they were waiting for their right-to-sue letters from the EEOC.” Id. at 438. We rejected the plaintiffs’ argument because “a litigant in this position has [several] options to preserve his claim,” including seeking a stay of the first suit until he receives the right-to-sue letter. Id. In Palka, res judicata barred the Title VII suit because the plaintiffs “availed themselves of none of these options.” Id. So too here. As the district court in Scholz II noted, Scholz had “a variety of options in navigating this issue, including asking that the administrative agency expedite the process, that the district court stay the first case pending the administrative process, or that the defendant agree to split a claim into two or more suits.” Scholz “availed [herself] of none of these options,” and so her argument about administrative remedies is unconvincing. See Palka, 662 F.3d at 438; see also Barr, 796 F.3d at 840 (“[T]he requirement to exhaust administrative remedies is no excuse for claim-splitting in [the employmentdiscrimination] context.”).