Court Opinion

ID: 9688210
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 17:39:09.959905+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:18:36.356885
License: Public Domain

PAGE, Justice
(concurring in part, dissenting in part).
I concur in the court’s opinion with respect to parts I and III. However, I disagree with the court’s attempt to distinguish our relatively recent holding in Fabio v. Bellomo, 504 N.W.2d 758 (Minn.1993), to reach a different result based on the facts of this case. In Fa-bio, in the face of Justice Gardebring’s dissent, which I joined along with Justice Wahl, the court reiterated the longstanding rule that, in general, a cause of action for medical malpractice accrues *724when a physician ceases to treat a patient for a particular condition. Id. at 762; see also Grondahl v. Bulluck, 318 N.W.2d 240, 243 (Minn.1982). In footnote 2 of her dissent, Justice Gardebring noted that, in addition to the continuing course of treatment rule, there are three other exceptions to the rule that the statute of limitations begins to run when treatment ceases in medical malpractice cases. Those exceptions are:
[T]he discovery rule, which tolls the limitations period until a patient discovered or should have discovered the injury; the fraudulent concealment exception, which tolls the statute until the condition was discovered or should have been discovered when a physician attempts to conceal his or her negligence, and the foreign object exception, which tolls the statute when a foreign object is found inside the body of a patient.
Fabio, 504 N.W.2d at 764. And, as Justice Gardebring pointed out, of these exceptions, “Minnesota recognizes only fraudulent concealment as a means of tolling the two-year statute of limitations. Schmucking v. Mayo, 183 Minn. 37, 235 N.W. 633 (1931); Couillard v. Charles T. Miller Hospital, Inc., 253 Minn. 418, 92 N.W.2d 96 (1958).”
Now, in its attempt to distinguish Fabio, the court, without acknowledging what it is doing, adopts the discovery rule for medical malpractice cases. While I disagreed with our 1993 holding in Fabio, stare deci-sis dictates that we follow it now. Zettler v. Ventura, 649 N.W.2d 846, 852 (Minn. 2002) (Anderson, R., J., dissenting) (“While the doctrine of stare decisis is not inflexible, it is not to be abandoned on a whim * ⅜ Therefore, I respectfully dissent.