Court Opinion

ID: 9628545
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 09:24:05.817363+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:09:14.685503
License: Public Domain

MOSK, J.
I dissent.
In American Bank & Trust Co. v. Community Hospital (1984) 36 Cal.3d 359 [204 Cal.Rptr. 671, 683 P.2d 670], a slim majority of this court approved the shifting of a substantial part of the burden of damages from the tortfeasor to the innocent victim. The purported reason was the desire to reduce premiums for medical insurance and by that means to lower medical and hospital costs.1 In my dissent in that case I pointed out how vain that purpose had then proved to be. The passage of time has further vindicated my views. In the nine years since adoption of the so-called Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act of 1975, medical and hospital costs have continued to rise astronomically. The only “reform” has been to magnanimously bestow on health providers a generous insulation from much of the responsibility for their more egregious negligence.
*183Now the majority compound their error by permitting yet another shift of the burdens of malpractice, this time from the medical malpractice defendant to the plaintiff’s employer or workers’ compensation carrier. Why the plaintiff’s employer or compensation carrier should bear any of the responsibility for the defendant’s malpractice defies rational explanation. Once again the only purpose suggested by the majority is a hoped-for reduction in medical malpractice insurance premiums. That the result will be an increase in workers’ compensation insurance premiums appears to be ignored. As between the two, which should logically shoulder the burden: the carrier of the tortfeasor or the carrier of the innocent employer? The answer is obvious.
One of the effects of Civil Code section 3333.1 is the shift of the burden of medical malpractice, and the associated insurance costs, to collateral sources. Whether insured or not, the cities that bear this added burden suffer a decrease in revenues, since there is no way in which they can recover their workers’ compensation and other expenditures caused by the negligence of the health care provider. For cities that are self-insured, as Huntington Park in the instant case, the effect is a direct reduction in revenues. For cities that are insured by the State Compensation Insurance Fund, the effect is indirect, but no less costly, in that they must pay higher premiums for their workers’ compensation insurance.
Local governments have been facing serious problems with rising workers’ compensation costs. In 1976, the Institute for Local Government published the result of a two-year study of workers’ compensation in the public sector in California. The institute noted that workers’ compensation laws and regulations are not “visible public issues” which are the subject of media reporting, but that the costs “are rising at alarming rates in local government” and that “workers’ compensation has become an issue of serious concern to public administrators.”2 From fiscal year 1968-1969 to 1972-1973, workers’ compensation costs increased by 154 percent. In that same period, the increase was even higher for police (261 percent) and fire (279 percent) employees.3
The Workmen’s Compensation Study Commission was established in 1963 by Labor Code sections 6200-6240 to study the workers’ compensation system and advise the Governor and the Legislature of its findings. The commission report in 1965 found that benefits for employees of insured employers increased from 1953 to 1962 by 195 percent. Medical benefits over the same period rose 137.9 percent while indemnity benefits increased *184by 232.2 percent. The foregoing statistics illustrate that the trend of workers’ compensation costs was steadily, and rapidly, increasing in the years prior to 1975 when the Legislature enacted Civil Code section 3333.1, which improvidently added another burden.
The attempt by respondents to isolate medical malpractice insurance as the only coverage that has experienced large cost increases is not justified by the facts. Admittedly there is some indication that medical malpractice insurance premiums were increasing prior to 1975 when section 3333.1 was adopted. However, to shift the burden of those rising costs to employers, including cities which themselves have experienced rising costs for workers’ compensation, is not a rational approach to achieve the purported goal of better health care for the residents of California. Indeed, from a public policy aspect, it is counterproductive.
In Li v. Yellow Cab Company (1975) 13 Cal.3d 804, 811 [119 Cal.Rptr. 858, 532 P.2d 1226, 78 A.L.R.3d 393], this court made it clear that we must maintain “a system in which liability is based on fault, the extent of fault should govern the extent of liability . . . .” We further declared that contributory negligence must be replaced “by a system under which liability for damage will be borne by those whose negligence caused it in direct proportion to their respective fault.” (Id., at p. 813.)
If an employer contributed in any way to the injury of the employee, the recovery by the employer in his employee’s suit against a third party tortfeasor will be reduced accordingly. (Associated Construction & Engineering Co. v. Workers’ Comp. Appeals Bd. (1978) 22 Cal.3d 829, 846-847 [150 Cal.Rptr. 888, 587 P.2d 684].) But if the employer is entirely free of negligence that caused the employee’s injury, as he would generally be in a medical malpractice case, there is a clear violation of the employer’s due process rights by shifting the burden from the tortfeasor to him or his carrier.
Section 3333.1 must fall for two elementary reasons. First, it creates an invidious classification, i.e., medical malpractice tortfeasors are permitted to pass on much of the burdens of their negligence to innocent third parties, unlike all other tortfeasors. There is no logical way to distinguish between a medical doctor who negligently severs a victim’s artery during surgery and a motorist who negligently severs a victim’s artery in an automobile accident. Under even the modest rational relationship test, this discriminatory classification serves no valid state purpose and is therefore untenable. Second, the code section as applied here deprives the innocent employer or his carrier of their property without any semblance of due process.
*185I would reverse the judgment. Bird, C. J., concurred.

The preamble to the legislation referred to the health crisis in terms, inter alia, of “severe hardships for the medically indigent, a denial of access for the economically marginal . . . .” (Stats. 1975-1976, Second Ex. Sess., ch. 2, § 12.5.)

Through the Roof, Institute for Local Self Government (1976) pages 4-5.

Ibid., page 12.