HARRISBURG – The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania has ruled that the Medical Care Availability and Reduction of Error (MCARE) Act’s two-year statute of limitations for survival and wrongful death litigation against health care companies is now tougher to circumvent.
On Dec. 12, the state’s high court found tolling of that statute of limitations only applies when a particular decedent’s medical cause of death has been misrepresented or concealed, not the legal circumstances which led to their death.
Supreme Court Justice David N. Wecht authored the Court’s majority opinion in the matter of Reibenstein v. Barax Et.Al, which overturns a prior ruling in this case from the Superior Court of Pennsylvania and remands the suit to the Lackawanna County Court of Common Pleas, for the restoration of its original order.
In that order, Dr. Patrick Conaboy, a defendant physician in the case, was granted summary judgment.
Chief Justice Debra Todd and Justice P. Kevin Brobson joined Wecht in the majority opinion, while Justices Kevin M. Dougherty and Sallie Updyke Mundy filed concurring and dissenting opinions and Justice Christine Donohue was not involved in considering the case.
According to Wecht, the phrase “cause of death” as interpreted in the MCARE Act is only meant in a medical sense, as opposed to a legal one.
“Ultimately, the statute requires what it requires. The phrase ‘cause of death’ as used in MCARE Section 513(d) refers specifically to the medical cause of death. Only an affirmative misrepresentation or fraudulent concealment of such medical cause of death will toll the two-year statute of limitations that MCARE prescribes for medical malpractice claims sounding in survival or wrongful death,” Wecht said.
Though plaintiffs may be compelled to conduct more discovery than usual to select defendant parties in wrongful death suits moving forward, Wecht pointed to engaging in said discovery, prior to filing litigation, as an alternate way to identify defendants.
“We do not reject entirely the salience of Reibenstein’s claim that limiting the tolling provision to medical causation will force plaintiffs to cast their nets more widely in determining whom to sue,” Wecht said.
“But while a plaintiff may at least begin suit against a bevy of health care providers with writs of summons, the certificate of merit requirement will nip unsubstantiated threats in the bud, as it evidently did in this case, when Reibenstein was unable to obtain a certificate of merit against Dr. Conaboy early in this litigation. Plaintiffs will have an opportunity to conduct timely, rigorous investigations of potential malpractice actions arising from fatal events, in keeping with MCARE’s objective.”
Justices Wecht, Todd and Brobson explained that Reibenstein brought suit against Conaboy based on information revealed in deposition testimony from Dr. Charles Barax, a defendant physician in the plaintiff’s initial wrongful death suit.
However, Barax did not give his deposition until after the statute of limitations had expired and the Lackawanna County Court of Common Pleas “found no evidence of affirmative misrepresentation or fraudulent concealment of the cause of death” that would have allowed Reibenstein to name Conaboy as a defendant after the two-year statute of limitations had elapsed.
According to Mundy, upholding summary judgment in Conaboy’s favor was appropriate, but she did not concur with her colleagues on the breadth of the concept of “cause of death.”
“Limiting the equitable tolling of the statute of limitations based on a defendant’s fraudulent concealment or affirmative misrepresentation to only those cases in which a defendant conceals the medical cause of death would leave unprotected medical malpractice victims who exercise reasonable diligence in investigating the cause of death but cannot discover the malpractice resulting in death because the medical professional’s conduct interferes with the survivor’s investigation,” Mundy said.
“Even though death is a definite event that puts survivors on inquiry notice, when a medical professional obstructs a reasonably diligent survivor’s subsequent inquiry into the cause of death, the legislature intended that the statute of limitations be tolled to protect the victims of medical malpractice. Most concerning, limiting ‘cause of death’ to the constrained definition of medical cause of death as listed on a death certificate, undermines the statute’s inclusion of the remedies of affirmative misrepresentation and fraudulent concealment.”
Supreme Court of Pennsylvania case 32 MAP 2021
Superior Court of Pennsylvania 1624 MDA 2019
Lackawanna County Court of Common Pleas case 2016-01716
From the Pennsylvania Record: Reach Courts Reporter Nicholas Malfitano at nick.malfitano@therecordinc.com