The Georgia Supreme Court split 4-3 in a ruling Monday rejecting a couple's Muscogee County claim that 2005 legislation prohibiting lawsuits over hospital emergency room care without proof of "gross negligence" is unconstitutional.
Carol and Robert Gliemmo challenged the law's constitutionality after suing St. Francis Hospital and emergency room physician Mark Cousineau, according to court documents. The couple claimed that on April 22, 2007, Carol Gliemmo felt "snapping in her head," and by ambulance was taken to St. Francis, where she was diagnosed with high blood pressure. She was released from the hospital after her blood pressure dropped and she felt better, but two days later her family doctor ordered a scan that disclosed a brain hemorrhage, which left her paralyzed.
The Gliemmos alleged the doctor was negligent; the defendants sought to have the suit dismissed under the 2005 tort-reform legislation that requires "clear and convincing evidence that the physician or health care provider's actions showed gross negligence."
The Gliemmos then argued that the legislation is a "special law" that violates the Georgia constitution's uniformity clause, which in part reads, "Laws of a general nature shall have uniform operation throughout this state and no local or special law shall be enacted in any case for which provision has been made in an existing general law."
In rejecting that claim, the majority compared the emergency room law to one already held to be constitutional, the Hospital Care for Pregnant Women Act. That legislation requires certain hospitals to care for pregnant women in labor, and prohibits lawsuits except when the person providing treatment "has been grossly negligent."
Relying on that precedent, the four justices decided the law the Gliemmos challenged also was not an unconstitutional special law "affecting only a limited activity in a specific industry during a limited time frame."
Wrote the majority: "Rather, as with the Hospital Care for Pregnant Women Act, it is a general law because it operates uniformly upon all health care liability claims arising from emergency medical care as provided in the statute.... It is not limited to claims based on a specific type of emergency medical care, and instead, it applies generally to all health care liability actions throughout the state which arise from emergency medical care as set forth in the statute."
Justice Robert Benham disagreed, writing for the minority in his dissent: "The General Assembly's effort to assist health care providers is arbitrary in that an emergency medical technician treating a patient who suffered a heart attack in an ambulance on the way to the emergency room does not receive the benefits of the statute simply because the patient has not yet arrived at the emergency room. The classification is unreasonable in that a physician who treats a patient for an emergency medical condition in an emergency room receives the statute's additional protection while a physician who treats the same condition in his office or on a house call does not."
The law thus "contains an unreasonable and arbitrary classification," which renders it an unconstitutional special law, Benham wrote.
The 2005 legislation was intended to aid hospitals and doctors who faced difficulties in obtaining liability insurance.
E-Mail
Print
