Court Opinion

ID: 9517191
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 00:07:30.303049+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:41:09.149865
License: Public Domain

Goodman, J.
(concurring in result). As I read the record as presented to us, it cannot be said that the decedent’s misstatements “in all likelihood” prevented the defendants from discovering the cancer. Contrast Pahigian v. Manufacturers’ Life Ins. Co. 349 Mass. 78, 86 (1965); Flanagan v. John Hancock Mutual Life Ins. Co. 349 Mass. 405, 409 (1965). But it is clear from the record (Zuckerman v. Blakeley, 3 Mass. App. Ct. 685, 686-687 [1975] ; see King v. Commissioner of Internal Rev., 458 F. 2d 245, 249 [6th Cir. 1972]) that the misstatements increased the risk of loss from “conditions of the urinary tract and any complications arising therefrom ...,” which the defendants would have excluded from coverage had the decedent not misrepresented her history of treatment. Because the decedent’s cancer of the bladder was subsumed in the exclusion which the defendants would have required, they are absolved from liability for that condition — without the assimilation of this case to the Pahigian and Flanagan cases. The majority appears to me to extend unduly the application of those cases.