Court Opinion

ID: 9683150
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 13:23:29.144443+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:17:45.570476
License: Public Domain

LEIBSON, Justice,
dissenting.
Respectfully, I dissent. The majority opinion concedes:
“In logic it would appear that liability for the resulting disability should be apportioned in the ratio that the work-connected exertion or stress and the underlying disease each contributed to bring about the heart attack.”
The majority then concludes that “Apportionment, however, is not dictated by logic but by statute, and the statute plainly directs” a contrary result. But the words of the statute are not so plain in their meaning. If they were we would not be considering three appeals with different results on the same facts.
The majority discards logic in favor of what it perceives to be “the purposes of the Compensation Act.” These are not “purposes” stated in the Act, but “purposes” as the majority perceives them. These “pur*537poses” are perceived as protecting employers from financial responsibility for heart attacks caused by a combination of work-connected exertion or stress and an underlying disease by shifting the entire expense, 100%, to the special fund. Hopefully, this will encourage employment of persons “with a history of hypertension or cardiovascular problems.”
I seriously doubt that we will see any rush to employ persons with such a history for work involving the kind of stress or exertion that might lead to heart attacks. It is more realistic to assume that in most of these heart attack cases the individual was employed because the underlying ath-erosclerotic condition was unknown. The result of our decision will be to protect employers from financial responsibility, with no corresponding increase in employment of persons with known significant atherosclerotic conditions.
The internal logic of the statutory scheme, rather than any unspecified legislative purpose, should direct us in deciding the meaning of the statute. KRS 342.120 created the special fund to pay a portion of the award where the employee has an occupational disability resulting from a combination of a pre-existing “dormant nondisabling disease or condition” and “a subsequent compensable injury by accident or an occupational disease.” KRS 342.-120(l)(b).
Subsection (3) directs apportionment of “the combined disabilities.” Subsection (4) directs that the public, through the special fund, pay “the remaining compensation ... for disability resulting from a dormant disease or condition aroused into disabling reality .... ” “Remaining compensation” implies that the employer has some initial liability for the traumatic event.
The statutory language of these sections cannot logically be considered as expressing a 100% obligation on the special fund in such situations.
A heart attack or a stroke is a traumatic event producing physical injury. Early on, the threshold debate was not whether the employer had suffered physical injury causing occupational disability from a heart attack on the job, but whether as a medical fact the stress and exertion on the job contributed to cause the heart attack. Now the medical evidence in such cases, almost uniformly, is that stress or exertion from the job is a precipitating factor but for which the heart attack would not have occurred. Logic compels that we include such a precipitating factor within the parameters of a “subsequent compensable injury,” and that we apportion financial responsibility for the occupational disability that results from the combination of an underlying, dormant and nondisabling ath-erosclerotic condition and the stress or exertion from the job on the basis of causation.
In Stovall v. Dal-Camp, Inc., the medical evidence was that work related stress was “a precipitating cause of the myocardial infarction,” caused “75%” by “preexisting atherosclerotic heart disease and 25% due to the stressful work incident.” The Board apportioned its award on the basis of this medical evidence. It was a logical decision consonant with the language of the statute. The Board should be affirmed.
Likewise, in Modem Electric & Furniture Co. v. Stovall, and in Gibson Lumber Co. v. Gibson, the Board’s award was based on competent medical evidence apportioning causation, and should be affirmed.