California medical malpractice damages cap stands
The California Supreme Court upheld the state’s $250,000 limit on noneconomic damages from medical malpractice cases, maintaining protection for providers from large claims.
California’s statutory cap stems back to the 1975 Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act, which states that damages for noneconomic losses shall not exceed $250,000 in any malpractice claim based on professional negligence.
In this case, Marisol Lopez, whose 4-year-old daughter died of melanoma, and her legal team argued that the physician assistants who “negligently overlooked” her daughter’s malignant mole operated outside of the scope of their license and were not properly supervised. Thus, the cap didn’t apply.
California Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu disagreed with that interpretation, claiming that allowing medical malpractice plaintiffs to avoid the cap in this way would be at odds with its purpose to “control and reduce medical malpractice insurance costs by placing a predictable, uniform limit on a defendant’s liability for noneconomic damages.”
Around half of states have malpractice caps on either financial or noneconomic damages, ranging from $250,000 to around $3 million, depending on the severity of the injury. Many states have struck down caps after deeming them unconstitutional, which has led to higher severity and frequency of malpractice claims, said John Hall, founding partner of Hall Booth Smith.
In Lopez’s case, there are reasonable arguments for excluding unsupervised PAs from a cap on noneconomic damages, Liu wrote in the opinion. But that would be up to the Legislature to decide and out
n of the court’s purview, he said.