Court Opinion

ID: 9852344
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 05:28:56.218929+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:22:26.054933
License: Public Domain

WALLER, Justice
(Concurring in result with the majority):
Although I am sympathetic to Tatum, I am constrained to concur with the majority opinion. Pursuant to S.C.Code Section 42-15-70, it is patent that MUSC is not liable for the negligence of its treating physician, and Tatum’s exclusive *208remedy is worker’s compensation. Accordingly, as the legislature has not indicated an intent to allow Tatum to recover in this situation, I must concur with the majority.
Moreover, although I am not averse to adoption of the dual persona doctrine, I concur with the majority that it would have no application to the present case. There is a distinction between the doctrines of dual capacity and dual persona. As noted by Professor Larson,
[A dual persona] is quite different than a person acting in a capacity other than that of employer. The question is not one of activity or relationship it is one of identity. The Tennessee Supreme Court, brushing aside all the fictitious sophistry of ‘dual capacity,’ nailed down this point with breathtaking simplicity:
The employer is the employer; not some person other than the employer. It is as simple as that.9 The only way a court can break through this monolithic truism is to resort to a legal fiction.
6 Arthur Larson & Lex K. Larson, Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law § 113.01[2](2000).
To hold Tatum may recover in tort from MUSC is, in reality, simply an application of the legal fiction known as the dual capacity doctrine, a doctrine sharply criticized by Professor Larson, and previously rejected by this Court. Id.; Johnson v. Rental Uniform Service of Greenville, 316 S.C. 70, 447 S.E.2d 184 (1994).

. Citing McAlister v. Methodist Hospital of Memphis, 550 S.W.2d 240, 246 (Tenn.1977), in which the Tennessee Supreme Court held a hospital employee who sustained a compensable injury while at work, and thereafter sustained further injury after undergoing surgery in same hospital to correct her back injury, could not bring tort action against hospital or treating physician as workmen’s compensation provided exclusive remedy.