OLYMPIA, Wash. (Legal Newsline) - Answering a question posed by a federal court, the Washington Supreme Court said an eight-year time limit for filing medical malpractice suits passed by state legislators in 2006 is unconstitutional because it takes away the right to sue from some plaintiffs while leaving it in place for others.
The Washington legislature passed the law to moderate medical malpractice insurance rates and cut down on lawsuits that hinge on claims that are too far in the past to prove or disprove. But the Supreme Court said it wasn’t enough for legislators to speculate insurance rates wouldn’t go up as fast; to survive judicial scrutiny, the law had to actually lower rates.
The decision drew a dissent from two justices, who said the legislature passed the statute of repose to replace an earlier one the Supreme Court had declared unconstitutional, fixing the defects in the earlier law and passing it to address what lawmakers believed were threats to the medical system.
“Without a limiting principle, the conclusion the legislature is left to reach is only that the court disagrees with a legislative decision,” wrote Justice Barbara Madsen, joined in dissent by Justice Charles Johnson. “This undermines the legislature’s confidence in making policy decisions that courts will uphold, absent violation of the law or constitution.”
The majority opinion, written by Justice Mary Yu, answered question raised in a federal lawsuit by Bette Bennett, who claimed traumatic brain injury from a nasal procedure at a naval hospital in 2009 that wasn’t diagnosed until 2017. The U.S. government moved to dismiss the case by citing Washington’s statute of repose, which sets an eight-year time limit after medical injury for filing suit, with a few exceptions including fraud and childhood sexual abuse.
After bouncing back and forth between district court and the Ninth Circuit, the question came before the Washington Supreme Court. The state high court ruled the law violates the privileges and immunities clause of Article I, Section 12 of the Washington Constitution. That clause prohibits laws that provide rights or immunities to one class of citizens but not another.
Given the statute of repose exempts certain litigants but not others, the majority said, the remaining question is whether legislators had “reasonable grounds” for passing the law. The 2006 version was passed to address flaws in an earlier statute, by adding expressly stated rationales. Those included statements the law “will tend to reduce rather than increase” the cost of malpractice insurance and protect against “claims, however few, that are stale.”
Those rationales aren’t sufficient, the Supreme Court said. In order for the law to pass muster, legislators must have justified it by stating it would lower malpractice premiums. And citing its own precedent in striking down another law that limited the rights of adults to sue for medical malpractice that occurred when they were minors, the court said the law was unconstitutional because only addressed a subset of stale claims.
“According to its plain language, the statute of repose does not in fact serve the legislature’s stated rationale of preventing stale claims generally,” the court ruled.
In her dissent, Justice Madsen said legislators balanced the interests of injured plaintiffs against those of the healthcare industry by finding an eight-year deadline to be reasonable.
“Under the majority decision, lawmakers will no doubt ask: What findings will pass reasonable ground muster—when is enough enough?” she wrote. “Trial judges will be left to wonder what might be the limiting principle for determining when a legislative finding is not supported in fact by reasonable grounds. The majority offers none.”