PASS LAVERN’S LAW – AN EDITORIAL:

During 2017, the state Senate passed 1,896 bills, the Assembly 998. Of those, 606 cleared both houses. Gov. Cuomo has signed 502 and vetoed 98. He has five more on his desk. As the year dribbles to an end, that leaves just one single bill sitting all by its lonesome waiting for a chance to go to the governor: Lavern’s Law.

This is outrageous. The bill must be sent to Cuomo immediately and he must sign it, as he has long promised he would.

It’s coming up on five years since the Daily News told Lavern Wilkinson’s tragic story of a missed cancer diagnosis and her untimely death at age 41, leaving behind a severely autistic daughter and quirk in the law that had left her unable to seek legal recourse and some compensation for her orphaned child.

Under current statutes, the two and half years to file a lawsuit for medical malpractice starts when the treatment error occurs, not when the patient learns of the problem. That’s all wrong. How can someone go to court until they know about their condition?

Wilkinson’s doctors at Kings County Hospital took a chest X-ray in 2010, but didn’t see the cancer until three years later. Only then did the malady get properly diagnosed. That was far too late for Wilkinson to survive and far too late to sue.

Lavern’s Law, proposed when she died in 2013, would let people file medical malpractice claims up to the two and half years after they learn of the condition.

It didn’t pass in 2013. Or 2014. Or 2015. Or 2016. It did pass in 2017, on the very last day of the session in June.

But it is stalled again. Already delayed by years. Already watered down to only cover cancer. Now Lavern’s Law sits on the shelf, in limbo, the last bill and one that should have been on the books back in 2013. The Legislature must give the measure to Cuomo and he must give it his signature.