Court Opinion

ID: 9690567
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 19:23:48.340384+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:18:59.696256
License: Public Domain

POTTER, Senior Judge,
concurring.
I concur with the result and interpretation given KRS 342.020 by the majority and write separately in order to emphasize the effect of statutory amendments.
In reaching the result below, the Board relied upon two sentences. The first sentence has been around for some time. For at least 50 years KRS 342.020 has stated, as it does today, that a worker is entitled to medical benefits “as may be reasonably required at the time of the injury and thereafter during disability....” March 23, 1916, Ky. Acts Ch. 38, Sec. 4; Carroll’s Ky. Statutes (6th ed. 1922) Sec. 483.
In 1970, Kentucky’s highest court interpreted this language as providing future medical benefits for a work-related injury even though the injury may not cause a permanent occupational disability. It is also noteworthy that the Court affirmed a Board interpretation of the statute. Although the Board now questions the soundness of its prior interpretation of the phrase “thereafter during disability,” it recognizes such to have become the law.
In 1994, the second sentence appeared. In that year, the Legislature amended the statute by adding that the “employer’s obligation to pay [medical] benefits shall continue for so long as the employee is disabled regardless of the duration of the employee’s income benefits.... ” 1994 Kentucky Acts, Ch. 181, Sec. 17.
In amending a statute, the Legislature is presumed to know not only the law, but the interpretation given its prior enactments by the courts. Button v. Hikes, 296 Ky. 163, 176 S.W.2d 112, 116 (Ky.1943). A correlation to this proposition is the so-called re-enactment doctrine which was described by the court in Commonwealth v. Trousdale, 297 Ky. 724, 728, 181 S.W.2d 254, 256 (Ky.1944), as follows:
It is a generally recognized rule of Statutory construction that when a statute has been construed by a court of last resort and the statute is substantially re-enacted, the Legislature may be regarded as adopting such construction.
The issue therefore becomes whether the Legislature, by adding the 1994 language (the second sentence), intended to deprive injured workers of the medical benefits they enjoyed before the amendment (granted by the first sentence). Clearly, the answer is no. If anything, the 1994 addition is an effort to affirm the protection given in the first sentence by ensuring that the medical benefits it confers (as interpreted by the courts and af*829firmed by the Legislature through its reenactment) are not cut short as a result of changes made elsewhere in the act.