Court Opinion

ID: 9708020
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 02:27:38.28775+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:18:23.704546
License: Public Domain

CHIEF JUSTICE CLARK, dissenting: The majority opinion amends by interpretation a statute which is unambiguous on its face, and hardly stands in need of tortuous explication. Moreover, the plain meaning of the statutory language, which the majority ignores, is more than sufficient to serve the statute’s declared goal of reducing medical malpractice insurance costs. Since I therefore believe that the court’s decision in this case violates settled principles of statutory construction, I respectfully dissent. The statute in question provides a statute of limitations for any “action for damages for injury or death against any *** hospital duly licensed under the laws of this State.” (Ill. Rev. Stat. 1981, ch. 83, par. 22.1.) The words chosen by the legislature in a statute are to be given their plain and ordinary meaning. (People v. Steppan (1985), 105 Ill. 2d 310, 317.) It seems to me that, in ordinary English, an action against a hospital is an action which names a hospital, duly licensed under the laws of this State, as a defendant. Sandra Hon is not a hospital. She is an individual. An action brought against her is not an action brought against a hospital. The fact that she is employed by or acting on the hospital’s behalf should not automatically confer upon her the benefits of a statute worded so as to protect hospitals, at least not without evidence that this was in fact what the legislature intended. If such evidence is contained in the majority opinion, it has escaped me. I agree with the majority that section 21.1 was enacted in response to a medical malpractice insurance crisis, marked by an accelerated rise in premiums charged by some insurance companies and the withdrawal of other companies from the medical malpractice insurance market. (Anderson v. Wagner (1979), 79 Ill. 2d 295, 317.) But this crisis did not affect all health-care providers equally. As this court noted in Anderson, the legislature was in possession of data which indicated that, for the year 1977, “claims against physicians and surgeons constituted 59% of all claims paid by count and 73% of the total amount of all claims that were paid. Claims against hospitals composed 36% of all claims paid by count and 25% by amount. Thus physicians and hospitals together accounted for 95% of the total number of medical malpractice claims and 98% of the dollar amount of those claims paid.” 79 Ill. 2d 295, 317. Thus, the legislature was directly reacting to a crisis primarily confined to two specific classes of health-care providers — physicians and hospitals. There was no crisis among hospital employees, the vast majority of whom would not carry personal liability insurance. It is true that hospital employees are defendants in many malpractice suits, and the institutions for which they work are impleaded for contribution or sued under respondeat superior. But surely the real targets of patient litigation are the “deep pockets” of institutional defendants, and not the “shallow pockets” of hospital employees. It is hospitals, not their employees, which have paid 25% of all successful malpractice claims. And it is hospitals, and not their employees, which have had difficulty obtaining insurance. Thus, the purpose of the legislation was, obviously, to alleviate a factual medical malpractice crisis affecting hospitals, and not a fictitious crisis affecting hospital employees. This court implicitly recognized this in Anderson, noting that the General Assembly “drew the statute very narrowly and encompassed within the classification to whom the statute applied only those segments of the health-care providers most acutely affected by the crisis.” (79 Ill. 2d 295, 319.) In fact, the court noted that the Illinois statute, like statutes in other jurisdictions, only “provides protection to a very limited group of medical personnel or facilities arid *** excludes nurses and a substantial body of medical personnel and healthcare facilities that could be involved in malpractice litigation.” (79 Ill. 2d 295, 309.) Since hospital personnel, as opposed to the hospitals they worked for, were not “acutely affected” by the crisis, the legislature could not have intended this statute to provide protection for them. Anderson is our leading case on the interpretation of section 21.1. While not determinative, it is surely worthy of more consideration than the majority’s curt dismissal of it. See 117 Ill. 2d at 155. Moreover, I am unable to understand why the majority believes that an interpretation of section 21.1 which gives the word “hospital” its plain and ordinary meaning would protect hospitals only in a “narrow, unreal sense.” (117 Ill. 2d at 156.) Hospitals would be protected in a very broad, real sense — after four years they and their insurers would be safe from any claims brought upon any theory, whether arising out of the hospital’s own negligence (see Darling v. Charleston Community Memorial Hospital (1965), 33 Ill. 2d 326, 332), or out of the hospital’s responsibility for the torts of its employees under the doctrine of respondeat superior. The fact that its employees would remain responsible for their own torts beyond the four-year period would have no effect on a hospital or its insurers. Finally, I note that the majority has not made clear whether it holds that the statute applies to all employees of hospitals, or only to registered nurses employed by hospitals. If it holds that the statute only protects registered nurses employed by hospitals, it is difficult to understand why the legislature later amended the statute to specifically include registered nurses. (See Ill. Rev. Stat. 1983, ch. 110, par. 13 — 212.) Since nurses, unlike physicians, are usually hospital employees, the addition of the words “registered nurses” would hardly have changed the law at all if the legislature had truly meant to include registered nurses employed by hospitals in the original statute. A material change in a statute made by an amendatory act is presumed to change the original statute. (See In re Cohn (1982), 93 Ill. 2d 190.) While the presumption may be rebutted by evidence that the original statute was ambiguous, and the legislature intended the subsequent amendment as a clarification (see People v. Bratcher (1976), 63 Ill. 2d 534), there is no evidence here that the word “hospital” was ambiguous, or that the addition of the phrase “registered nurse” was intended to clarify its meaning. For the foregoing reasons, I respectfully dissent. JUSTICE MILLER joins in this dissent.