Court Opinion

ID: 9483646
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:27:42.888268+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:45.504331
License: Public Domain

MORRIS SHEPPARD ARNOLD, Circuit Judge,
dissenting and concurring.
I concur in the court’s judgment to the extent that it is based on the proposition that the relevant pooled liability agreement did not cover the event that gave rise to this case. I respectfully dissent, however, from so much of the court’s opinion that holds that the pooled liability agreement is not “other insurance.”
In the first place, I am uneasy about the conclusion that, because it is collateral to an employment contract, the coverage provided cannot be insurance. If an employer required an employee to have a liability policy and then promised to pay the premium, or if an employer purchased coverage for an employee directly from a commercial carrier, the fact that the coverage was made available collaterally to an employment contract would not make it any the less insurance. (In fact, insurance is a very common employee benefit.) This case is no different as a matter of economic reality. It would seem to me, moreover, that the plain meaning of the Appellant’s policy is that it restricts coverage to those situations in which a risk has not already been shifted from a covered party to someone else. In common parlance, the covered party is an insured and the someone else is an insurer.
Secondly, the unfocused state of the record before us makes me dubious about the proposition that Sisters of Mercy, Inc. (Sisters), would be liable for the torts committed by St. John’s employees, and, presumably, for those committed by the employees of all the other relevant hospitals as well. Perhaps Sisters would be liable. But for me, the allegation that Sisters controls, manages; or operates all of the hospitals which contribute to the pooled liability fund lacks sufficient specificity to support a finding of the agency relationship necessary for liability. I would like to know a lot more about the precise relationship between Sisters and the other relevant entities before I agreed to the court’s conclusion. For instance, suppose Sisters simply assigns members of its order to certain hospitals as administrators who are paid by those hospitals. It would be perfectly plausible to describe this situation as one in which Sisters is “managing” the hospitals, but, without more, Sisters would not be liable for the hospitals’ employees’ torts. The hospital would be liable, but not Sisters, because neither the hospital nor the employees were agents of Sisters.
Finally, even if I agreed with the court’s analysis concerning the nature of the pooled agreement here, I would not, in view of the availability of the alternate grounds for deciding the case, reach the question. I would leave it for a later day when a better record, and the necessity of deciding the question, might make for a more deliberate and mature reflection, and, perhaps, a different result.