Court Opinion

ID: 9762417
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 02:23:03.102353+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:29:34.264411
License: Public Domain

WINTERSHEIMER, Justice,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent because the Court of Appeals and the trial court did not commit reversible error. The trial court was correct in granting summary judgment based on the statute of limitations in K.R.S. 413.140. The medical malpractice statute is distinguishable from K.R.S. 413.-135, which was found unconstitutional in Tabler v. Wallace, Ky., 704 S.W.2d 179 (1986) because K.R.S. 413.135 is a statute of repose and not of limitation.
The general assembly intended to have a termination point for various types of legal actions or otherwise there would be no statute of limitations. There is no basis present in this action to extend the holding of Tabler, supra, to declare K.R.S. 413.140, the medical malpractice statute of limitations to be unconstitutional.
K.R.S. 413.140(2) is different from the statute involving architects liability because it does not extinguish a cause of action before it arises. Physicians and hospitals were not given special immunity by virtue of the statute. The difference between the two statutes is that the architect statute ends an action before it ever begins, while the medical malpractice law lengthens the time after the action has accrued. The architects statute provided immunity from suit but the medical statute provides no such immunity because it establishes a specific time for an action to be commenced, running from the date of the injury.
K.R.S. 413.140(2) enlarged the rights of a plaintiff by granting additional time to the extent of four years to discover an injury. The legislature’s adoption of the medical *21malpractice of statute of limitations did not serve to regulate the limitation of a civil lawsuit. Consequently, K.R.S. 413.140(2) does not violate Sec. 59 of the Kentucky Constitution. In any event, the general assembly had a rational justification for enacting the law and it is constitutional.