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If you’re like me, you may have struggled to reconcile competing ideals illustrated in a story in last week’s edition of Arkansas Business.
It is absolutely ridiculous that a hospital system in Arkansas would be facing more than $500 million in damages for failing to notify patients that their doctor had moved his practice to another clinic.
However, it is equally offensive to my sense of justice — perhaps more — that the state stepped in and changed the law after those patients and that doctor had initiated legal actions against the hospital system.
So a group of Arkansans were aggrieved under one set of rules, and when they sought remedy under those rules, the Legislature changed the law without grandfathering in the patients who were wronged.
After the change, the patients abandoned their legal efforts; I can only assume because it was no longer worth their or their lawyers’ while to pursue the case with damages now capped at 0.1% of the amount they were looking at before the amendment.
Here’s the background:
In 2017, the Arkansas General Assembly passed the Patient Right-to-Know Act in response to several cases in which clinics declined to tell patients that their doctors had moved or, in some cases, outright misled patients to keep their business.
That law allowed for damages of $1,000 per day per violation.
Fast-forward to 2019 when Dr. Leslie Anderson of Lonoke was terminated without cause from St. Vincent Medical Group. In a lawsuit, Anderson claimed he wasn’t able to notify his patients about the change and St. Vincent Medical Group ignored his request to notify his patients of his new practice for eight months.
Anderson’s patients also sued St. Vincent, and the judge granted class-action status to the patients — all 2,143 of them — in 2022. That decision was ultimately overturned, but at $1,000 a day for about 250 days for each patient, the total damages could have been more than $500 million.
Again, that amount is flagrantly excessive, and the law needed to be changed. But I’m bothered how the law was amended in two respects.
First, the amended Patient Right-to-Know Act caps damages at $500,000. I don’t think that adequately disincentivizes bad actors from violating the law. By holding onto patients, a clinic could find that it wouldn’t take long to make that much money — or more — off of them. I think we’d have been better off giving some deference to judges and juries to set appropriate damages on a case-by-case basis as we do in other parts of the law.
Second, I don’t like that the rules were changed while litigation was pending without a grandfather clause. I think that’s a slippery slope the state shouldn’t go barreling down.
We should all be treated equal under the law, and not have the rules changed in mid-game.
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