Court Opinion

ID: 9884350
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-10-06 02:53:49.011758+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:48:37.847787
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Schaefer, dissenting: The net of the opinion is that because the taxpayers of a city have undertaken the financial burden of building and maintaining a municipal hospital, they must also bear the additional burden of providing free hospital care for those medically indigent residents of the township who are also residents of the city. Responsibility for the care of medically indigent residents of cities that do not maintain hospitals is upon the township. I can not believe that the legislature intended this result. The opinion reaches its curious conclusion because section 44 — 6 of the Revised Cities and Villages Act says that when a city maintains a hospital, “every inhabitant of that city who is not a pauper” shall pay for the care that he receives. (Ill. Rev. Stat. 1957, chap. 24, par. 44 — 6.) No one is here attempting to charge Clay, the injured man, for the hospital care that he received. Section 44 — 6 does not purport to deal at all with the question in this case, which is what governmental unit is to bear the cost of the hospital care that was furnished to Clay. Section 4 — 14 of the Public Assistance Code deals with the matter of financial responsibility for care furnished to “medically indigent persons.” With exceptions not relevant here, it places the burden of furnishing them “medical, dental, hospital, boarding or nursing care, or burial” upon the township. (Ill. Rev. Stat. 1955, chap. 23, pars. 439 — 14, 439 — 9.) It is not disputed that Clay falls within the statutory definition of a medically indigent person. I see no repugnancy between the provision that says that a pauper shall not be charged by a city hospital for the care that he receives, and the provision that places the financial burden of furnishing that care upon the township. Both provisions can exist together. But even if there can somehow be distilled from section 44 — 6 of the Revised Cities and Villages Act anything that is repugnant to the allocation of financial responsibility contained in the Public Assistance Code, the conclusion that the opinion reaches is still unwarranted. The title of the Public Assistance Code of 1949 states that it is an act “to revise the public assistance laws of Illinois, to consolidate and codify such laws, to prescribe the functions, powers, and duties of governmental units, agencies and persons thereunder, * * It is axiomatic that a comprehensive legislative revision is, “in effect, a legislative declaration that whatever is embraced in the new statute shall prevail and that whatever is excluded shall be discarded.” (Village of Atwood v. Cincinnati, Indianapolis and Western Railroad Co. 316 Ill. 425, 430-2; Northern Trust Co. v. Chicago Railways Co. 318 Ill. 402; City of Fairfield v. Pappas, 362 Ill. 80, 84; People v. Horwitz, 362 Ill. 289, 291.) To the extent that there may be repugnancy between the Public Assistance Code of 1949 and section 44 — 6 of the Revised Cities and Villages Act, the latter section has been repealed by implication. Village of Atwood v. Cincinnati, Indianapolis and Western Railroad Co. 316 Ill. 425. Hershey and Davis, JJ., join in this dissent.