[J-10A-2017 and J-10B-2017] [MO: Mundy, J.]
IN THE SUPREME COURT OF PENNSYLVANIA
EASTERN DISTRICT
ROBERT DUBOSE, ADMINISTRATOR : No. 21 EAP 2016
OF THE ESTATE OF ELISE DUBOSE, :
DECEASED : Appeal from the judgment of Superior
: Court entered 10/23/2015 at No. 2752
: EDA 2013 (reargument denied
v. : 12/23/2015) affirming the judgment
: entered August 21, 2013, in the Court of
: Common Pleas, Philadelphia County,
MARK QUINLAN, DONNA BROWN, : Civil Division, at No. 0846, September
RNC, BSN, ALBERT EINSTEIN MEDICAL : Term 2009.
CENTER D/B/A WILLOWCREST, :
WILLOWCREST AND JEFFERSON :
HEALTH SYSTEM :
:
:
APPEAL OF: WILLOWCREST NURSING :
HOME, ALBERT EINSTEIN :
HEALTHCARE NETWORK, ALBERT :
EINSTEIN MEDICAL CENTER D/B/A :
WILLOWCREST AND WILLOWCREST : ARGUED: March 7, 2017
ROBERT DUBOSE, ADMINISTRATOR : No. 22 EAP 2016
OF THE ESTATE OF ELISE DUBOSE, :
DECEASED, : Appeal from the judgment of the
: Superior Court entered 10/23/2015 at
Appellee : No. 2753 EDA 2013 (reargument denied
: 12/23/2015) affirming the judgment
: entered August 21, 2013, in the Court of
v. : Common Pleas, Philadelphia County,
: Civil Division, at No. 1603 August
: Term, 2009.
WILLOWCREST NURSING HOME, AND :
ALBERT EINSTEIN HEALTHCARE :
NETWORK, :
:
Appellants : ARGUED: March 7, 2017
CONCURRING AND DISSENTING OPINION
JUSTICE BAER DECIDED: November 22, 2017
I respectfully but vigorously dissent from the majority’s radical departure from this
Commonwealth’s well-established jurisprudence providing that the statute of limitations
for a medical professional negligence action commences when the cause of action
accrued (i.e., when the plaintiff was injured by the professional negligence). According
to the majority, where such an action is pursued by the deceased plaintiff’s personal
representative, the statute of limitations is extended, potentially for several years, until
two years after the plaintiff’s death, thereby granting the personal representative far
more rights than the plaintiff would have possessed while alive. Consistent with Chief
Justice Saylor’s dissenting opinion, I find no support for this proposition in Section
513(d) of the Medical Care Availability and Reduction of Error Act (“MCARE Act”), 40
P.S. § 1303.513(d). In my view, the majority’s strained interpretation of Section 513(d)
flies in the face of this Court’s settled case law regarding the nature of a survival action
and is contrary to both the purpose behind the MCARE Act and the express legislative
designation of Section 513 as a statute of repose.
Notwithstanding my strong opposition to the majority’s interpretation of Section
513(d), I agree with the majority that the present action was filed timely based on the
trial court’s alternative holding that the statute of limitations was tolled by the discovery
rule until the decedent’s death. Accordingly, I would affirm the Superior Court’s
decision, finding the action timely, on this alternative basis.
As the majority acknowledges, Section 513 of the MCARE Act, 40 P.S. §
1303.513, entitled “Statute of repose,” provides, in relevant part:
(a) GENERAL RULE.-- Except as provided in subsection (b) [relating to
injuries caused by a foreign object left in the body] or (c) [relating to
injuries of minors], no cause of action asserting a medical professional
liability claim may be commenced after seven years from the date of the
alleged tort or breach of contract.
* * *
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(d) DEATH OR SURVIVAL ACTIONS.-- If the claim is brought under 42
Pa.C.S. § 8301 (relating to [a wrongful] death action) or 8302 (relating to
survival action), the action must be commenced within two years after the
death in the absence of affirmative misrepresentation or fraudulent
concealment of the cause of death.
40 P.S. § 1303.513.
Consistent with the General Assembly’s express designation of Section 513 as a
statute of repose, the majority holds that subsection (a) is a statute of repose that
precludes medical professional liability causes of action from being commenced more
than seven years after the alleged tort, with exceptions not applicable here. See
Majority Opinion at 21, 22 (providing that “Section 513(a) sets forth a seven-year statute
of repose for medical professional liability claims;” “Section 513(a) bars the plaintiff’s
ability to sue regardless of whether the cause of action accrued, whether the injury
occurred, or whether it was discovered.”). In construing the meaning of subsection (d),
however, the majority divorces that provision from its legislative designation as a statute
of repose. Moreover, notwithstanding that the statutory text does not reference
“accrual” or “statute of limitations,” the majority interprets Section 513(d) as a statute of
limitations that alters profoundly the traditional time of accrual of a surviving professional
medical liability claim. I find this interpretation untenable.
Critical to determining the import of Section 513(d) is an understanding of the
nature of a “survival action.” The Survival Act provides that “all causes of action or
proceedings, real or personal, shall survive the death of the plaintiff. . . .” 42 Pa.C.S.
§ 8302. As acknowledged by the majority, this Court has consistently held that the
survival statute does not create a new independent cause of action, but merely permits
a personal representative to enforce a cause of action that has already accrued to the
plaintiff before death. Pastierik v. Duquesne Light Co., 526 A.2d 323, 326 (Pa. 1987);
Anthony v. Koppers Co., 436 A.2d 181, 185 (Pa. 1981) (plurality); Pezzulli v.
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D’Ambrosia, 26 A.2d 659, 661 (Pa. 1942). Thus, a personal representative pursuing the
tort action of a deceased plaintiff is bound by the two-year statute of limitations for
personal injury actions, 42 Pa.C.S. § 5524(2), which, by legislative mandate,
commences “from the time the cause of action accrued.” 42 Pa.C.S. § 5502(a).
This Court has definitively declared when accrual occurs. We have held that
because a surviving tort action brought by the personal representative of a deceased
plaintiff is based upon the deceased plaintiff’s injuries, the cause of action accrues (and
the statute of limitations begins to run) when the plaintiff reasonably should have
discovered his or her injuries; if the plaintiff could not have reasonably discovered the
injuries while alive, the cause of action accrues, at the latest, at the time of plaintiff’s
death. Pastierik, 526 A.2d at 326; Anthony, 436 A.2d at 183. Naturally, the personal
representative’s claim mirrors the claim that the plaintiff would have pursued if alive, no
more and no less.
In one fell swoop, the majority has eradicated this jurisprudence and holds that,
pursuant to Section 513(d) of the MCARE Act (entitled “Statute of repose”), the statute
of limitations for a medical professional liability claim brought by the deceased plaintiff’s
personal representative is no longer tied to when the plaintiff’s cause of action accrued
and no longer begins to run at the time the plaintiff reasonably should have discovered
the alleged injury, but, instead begins to run at the time of plaintiff’s death. The
application of this holding to a fact pattern disparate from the one presented herein
illustrates its absurdity. Assume that a physician negligently failed to diagnose a
patient’s cancer in 2010. Assume further that later in that same year, the patient
became aware of the cancer and the physician’s failure to diagnose the condition. It
appears undisputed that under 42 Pa.C.S. § 5524(2), the patient’s statute of limitations
for this personal injury action would expire in 2012, two years after the injury was
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discovered and the professional medical liability cause of action accrued. Under the
majority’s labored construction, however, if patient dies of the same cancer in 2015, the
patient’s cause of action that expired in 2012 is miraculously resurrected and,
remarkably, the patient’s personal representative has until 2017, i.e., two years from
patient’s death, to commence the action.1 Thus, the majority’s interpretation of Section
513(d), contained within a statute of repose, through nothing short of sleight of hand,
extends the statute of limitations from two to seven years, granting to the personal
representative an independent cause of action that the deceased plaintiff could not have
pursued personally in his own right had he remained alive.
By any stretch of the imagination, this could not be what the General Assembly
intended when it enacted Section 513(d) of the MCARE Act. There is no language in
Section 513(d) suggesting that the General Assembly intended to alter fundamentally
the existing substantive law by creating an independent cause of action of the plaintiff’s
personal representative, which is unmoored to the plaintiff’s injuries and is, instead,
tethered only to the time of the plaintiff’s death. The majority, in essence, has taken a
legislative restriction on the filing of a cause of action, as demonstrated by the General
Assembly’s designation of the provision as a statute of repose, and, as revealed by the
posed hypothetical, transformed it into an expansion of the time for filing the cause
action by potentially more than threefold. The majority accomplished this task by
interpreting language in the MCARE Act, which was enacted in response to perceived
spiraling costs of medical malpractice claims. Pa. Med. Soc’y v. Dep’t of Pub. Welfare,
39 A.3d 267, 271 (Pa. 2012); see also 40 P.S. § 1303.102(1) & (3) (providing that the
1
We note that the personal representative’s action commenced in 2017 was filed within
Section 513(a)’s seven-year statute of repose, which the majority recognizes as the only
valid statute of repose set forth in Section 513.
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purpose of the MCARE Act is to ensure that high quality health care is available in this
Commonwealth and that medical professional liability insurance is obtainable at an
affordable and reasonable cost). 2 I cannot join this undisciplined judicial expansion of
the law.
Considering, as we must, the language of subsection (d) in the context in which it
appears in Section 513 (“Statute of repose”) and in connection with the statutory
scheme of the MCARE Act as a whole, it becomes clear that Section 513(d)’s language
that the surviving medical professional liability claim “must be commenced within two
years after the death” merely codifies existing law. See Saylor, J., dissenting, at 3
(opining that “Section 513(d) does nothing more than codify aspects of the decisional
law pertaining to the outside limits of accrual and tolling relative to survival actions”).
Section 513(d) reiterates the long-established link between the plaintiff’s cause of action
and the personal representative’s cause of action as it applies to the statute of repose,
such that the personal representative’s time constraints are commensurate with those of
the plaintiff. Had the Legislature intended to lengthen significantly the time period in
which surviving medical professional liability claims could be filed and thereby effectuate
the dramatic transformation of the law that the majority purports, it would have done so
expressly, and it would not have done so within a statute of repose.
Notwithstanding my fundamental disagreement with the majority’s interpretation
of Section 513(d), I agree that, in this case, the action was filed timely. As noted, I rely
upon the trial court’s alternative holding that the statute of limitations was tolled by the
discovery rule until the decedent’s death, given the ongoing and cumulative nature of
2
The majority’s interpretation of Section 513(d) also creates an unnecessary distinction
between the accrual of different types of survival claims, whereby survival claims based
upon professional medical negligence accrue at the time of death, while other survival
claims, such as those alleging a defective product, accrue at the time of injury.
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the decedent’s disabling injuries which ultimately resulted in her death. See Trial Court
Opinion, June 27, 2014, at 11-12 (holding that, ‘[a]lternatively, [Appellee] would have
two years under the discovery rule to bring a survival action for pain and suffering,
especially where the decedent was comatose”).
In summary, I would interpret Section 513(d) as a statute of repose, setting forth
the maximum allotted time in which a personal representative of a deceased plaintiff
may file a medical professional liability claim, i.e., within two years from death. As the
two-year statute of limitations began to run when the decedent reasonably should have
discovered her injuries and the record supports the trial court’s conclusion that the
decedent’s condition rendered her unable to discover her injuries while alive, the
decedent’s personal representative had two years from the date of her death to file the
instant action. Having filed the action within such two-year period, I agree with the
majority’s mandate to affirm the lower court’s determination that decedent’s survival
action was filed timely.
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