dissenting:
I was against granting the petition for leave to appeal in this case, and I still think review by this court was inappropriate. The court’s decision today does not award Wood River, Medical Radiological, or Dr. Marrese a single penny more than they were otherwise entitled to. It merely makes it easier for them to collect the amount plaintiff already owes by increasing their statutory lien rights against her settlement proceeds. The increase for all three health care providers totals all of $82.53.
Eighty-two dollars and fifty-three cents in additional lien rights for three providers for four years of litigatian. That is all this case is or was ever about. What this shows to me is that there is no amount too trivial to warrant the court’s intervention if my colleagues believe they can make the litigation process more difficult for plaintiffs.
Wholly aside from these considerations, I believe that the majority’s opinion is misguided. The appellate court correctly noted that if the various liens could be aggregated, as the majority here holds, the total lien amount could easily consume the plaintiff’s entire •recovery. The plaintiff would have hired an attorney and endured the rigors of litigation and achieved success and be left with nothing. I share the appellate court’s view that the legislature could not have intended such an absurd and unjust result.
A second flaw in the majority’s analysis is that it can yield inequitable and absurd results even among the lien holders themselves. Because the majority treats each of the lien statutes as being independent of the others, the size of a particular health care provider’s lien may depend on the fortuity of whether the other lien holders are governed by the same lien statute or by a different one.
The anomalies that can result are readily illustrated. Assume, for example, that a plaintiff receives a $9,000 recovery and has agreed to pay his attorney a one-third contingency fee. If the plaintiff had a physical therapy bill of $3,000 and a bill from his doctor for $3,000, the majority’s approach would mean that the therapist and the doctor could each assert liens for the full amount they were owed, a total of $6,000. If, however, the providers submitting the $3,000 bills were both doctors rather than a doctor and a physical therapist, their combined lien rights would be limited to $3,000, half as much. Similarly, if there were two doctors who both had bills of $3,000 in addition to the physical therapist with the $3,000 bill, each of the doctors would have to accept liens for a reduced amount, while the physical therapist would be entitled to a lien for the full $3,000.
I can see no rational basis for such disparate results. The appellate court’s approach avoids these problems completely. The majority’s analysis simply ignores them. In so doing, it sets the stage for inequities that the legislature could not have intended and failed to recognize when it debated and enacted the law.
Where the passage of a series of legislative acts results in confusion and consequences that the General Assembly may not have contemplated, the courts must construe the acts in such a way as to reflect the obvious intent of the legislature and permit practical application of the law. People ex rel. Community High School District No. 231 v. Hupe, 2 Ill. 2d 434, 448 (1954). The appellate court did that here. Its judgment should therefore be affirmed. Accordingly, I dissent.