Court Opinion

ID: 9733156
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 16:55:15.931466+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:27:02.402337
License: Public Domain

HUTCHINSON, Justice,
dissenting.
I dissent. I believe that the majority’s decision largely emasculates the requirements section 108(n) imposes for proving an unenumerated occupational disease. By inserting section 108 into the Workmen’s Compensation Law, the legislature intended comprehensively to provide for individuals disabled due to occupational diseases. Section 108(n) provided for occupational diseases not recognized at that time. Under it, a claimant must show that he is exposed to the disease as a result of his employment, that the disease is causally related to his employment and that it it has a statistically greater incidence among persons engaged in his occupation than it does among the general public. The legislature could hardly have intended that we circumvent its careful provisions by allowing recovery for aggravation of any disease through the general provisions of section 301 defining injury. By coupling together sections 301(c)(1) and 301(c)(2) to define injury as including aggravation of non-work related, pre-existing diseases, the majority has done just that. The legislature’s intent in enacting the 1972 amendments to section 301(c), elimination of the former statute’s accident requirement for all injuries, is ignored by this broad construction. Considering this background, I believe the specific provisions of section 108(n) should over*470ride the general provisions of section 301(c) in accordance with the usual rules of statutory construction. 1 Pa.C.S. § 1933.
I find no evidence that the legislature embraced a “take the worker as you find him” approach with respect to occupational diseases. Instead, in section 108(n), it required a substantial correlation between the disease and employment. Aggravation of a pre-existing disease is not consistent with the approach taken in section 108(n). Our current law eschews magic words and requires some substantial connection between the injury and the employment. See Kusenko v. Republic Steel Corp., 506 Pa. 104, 484 A.2d 374 (1984). Moreover, the evidence in this case showed that appellee’s condition was also subject to aggravation by many common substances, including cigarette smoke and hair spray. In the face of section 108(n), it seems wrong to me to impose upon this employer the burden of compensating appellee for a disease which is not peculiar to his occupation. The diseases included in section 301(c)(2)’s definition of injury should be limited to diseases peculiar to an industry and not extended to those which commonly afflict the general population and are subject to aggravation by any number of substances commonly found in that part of the earth on which we live.
Finally, I suspect the economic implications of the majority’s decision will have a severe impact on both present employers and future prospective employees who suffer from common conditions which are non-disabling but subject to aggravation by a broad range of common substances. The extent of that impact is necessarily unknown to this Court and cannot be evaluated within the context of a particular case record. It is clear to me, however, the majority works a major change in our compensation law. As such, I believe it would be wise to leave that change, with its potentially huge economic implication, to more explicit legislative direction than I find in the current statute. The legislature is, I believe, better equipped to investí*471gate and balance the interests, human and eocnomic, which are involved in this issue than we are.
Unlike the majority, I find appellant’s arguments neither preposterous nor bizarre. They seem to me to reflect the legislature’s decision to limit recovery of benefits for occupational diseases. Today’s decision is likely to wreak havoc with those limits.