Florida’s 4th District Court of Appeal recently issued an opinion that has a dramatic impact for victims of medical malpractice: those severely injured by medical malpractice no longer face a limit on the amount of pain and suffering a jury can award them.
North Broward Hospital District v. Susan Kalitan deals with a case where a woman was severely injured when her esophagus was punctured from intubation, during a routine carpal tunnel operation. The jury determined that Ms. Kalitan did suffer a “catastrophic injury” as defined in Florida Statute §766.118 and awarded her $4,718,011 in total damages. $4 million of those dollars were for both past and future pain and suffering, which are also call noneconomic damages. Noneconomic damages means damages that aren’t already fixed numbers, such as medical bills amounts or the value of damaged property. We also call them human damages because they are what we specifically as people go through when we are seriously injured. Noneconomic damages commonly include emotional or psychological pain and suffering or mental anguish. It can be very difficult for people to translate the emotional pain someone has suffered after a serious injury, partial paralysis in Ms. Kalitan’s case, into a dollar amount. You can never make the person injured whole again, but what dollar could be awarded that would at least make it easier to live?
Fla. Stat. §766.118, designed to ease the pressure doctors face in malpractice insurance premiums, places limits on the amount of noneconomic damages in wrongful death and medical malpractice injury cases to just $500,000. There are several factors that further raise the cap. Suffering a “catastrophic injury” is one of these. Ms. Kalitan was found to have suffered one such catastrophic injury and the jury accordingly awarded her what they thought would make her as whole as possible after being in a drug-induced coma for weeks and suffering from an episodic neurological disorder. However, the medical treaters that caused her injury tried to invoke Fla. Stat. §76.118 to limit her noneconomic damages to close to $2 million.
In a recent Federal case, Estate of McCall v. United States, the part of Fla. Stat. §766.118 that places caps on noneconomic damages in wrongful death cases was declared unconstitutional, in Florida, because it violated the Florida Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. Similar to the U.S. Equal Protection Clause, Florida’s states that “everyone is entitled to stand before the law on equal terms with, to enjoy the same eights as belong to, and to bear the same burden as are imposed upon others in a like situation.” In medical malpractice situations, this means that all injured plaintiffs are entitled to the same court relief as all other injured plaintiffs. The court in McCall concluded that §766.118 allows plaintiffs who were injured less severely to recover the full amount of the jury award while more severely injured plaintiffs were being forced to accept less than the full award from the jury. Because injured plaintiffs were not getting the same rights under the law, the court determined the law was unconstitutional.
Because the case in McCall was a wrongful death case, the court could only determine the part of §766.118 dealing with wrongful death noneconomic damages caps violated the Florida Constitution. North Broward Hospital District v. Susan Kalitan is important because it dealt with personal injury resulting from medical malpractice, which was the other kind of cap in §766.118. There hasn’t been a Florida Supreme Court decision on §766.118 and caps on medical malpractice injuries. Because the 4th District Court of Appeal is the highest court to have determined the section of §766.118 that places limits on medical malpractice pain and suffering awards is unconstitutional, it is now the law across all of Florida.
The takeaway from all of this is that if you are severely injured due to the negligence of a medical professional, there is no longer any limitation to a jury awarding you as much as they deem necessary to compensate you for all of the pain and suffering you have and will endured because of your injury.