This bulletin reproduces a post from Horvitz & Levy’s California Supreme Court blog, At the Lectern, courtesy of the blog’s author David Ettinger.
In Lopez v. Ledesma, the Supreme Court today holds a damage limitation provision of the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act (MICRA) “applies to a physician assistant who has a legally enforceable agency relationship with a supervising physician and provides services within the scope of that agency relationship, even if the physician violates his or her obligation to provide adequate supervision.”
The 46-year-old statute caps noneconomic damages at $250,000 “[i]n any action for injury against a health care provider based on professional negligence.” If the court had ruled the statute inapplicable, the plaintiff would have received $4,250,000 in noneconomic damages.
The MICRA statute says covered “professional negligence” is negligently rendered professional services that “are within the scope of services for which the provider is licensed and which are not within any restriction imposed by the licensing agency.” Another statute requires a physician assistant to “render[ ] . . . services under the supervision of a licensed physician and surgeon.”
The court’s unanimous opinion by Justice Goodwin Liu concludes that an agency relationship is sufficient “supervision” to invoke MICRA and that additionally requiring the supervision to be adequate “ ‘would threaten not only [MICRA’s] goal [of controlling medical malpractice insurance costs] but also the broader purpose of MICRA.’ ” The court does also say, however, that “there are reasonable policy arguments” for making actual supervision a prerequisite to the damage limit’s applicability, if the Legislature so chooses.
The court affirms the 2-1 published opinion of the Second District, Division Two, Court of Appeal.
