Howell Case Expanded to Include Future Damages
Article authored by David Melton, Lindsay Goulding and Colleen Howard
Recently, the California Court of Appeal for the Second Appellate District issued its opinion inCorenbaum v. Lampkin. In that case, Defendant Dwight Lampkin collided with a taxicab and caused injuries to Plaintiffs Corenbaum and Carter, who were passengers in the taxicab. Corenbaum and Carter sued Lampkin for compensatory and punitive damages. The jury awarded Corenbaum $1.8 million and Carter $1.4 million for past and future medical care, as well as noneconomic damages based on evidence of the full amounts billed for past medical care. The trial court excluded evidence of the lesser amounts accepted by the medical providers as full payment.
On appeal, Lampkin argued that the trial court erred in admitting evidence of the full amounts billed for plaintiffs’ medical care when the amounts accepted by their medical providers as full payments was less than the amount billed. The appellate court agreed with Lampkin, and reversed the trial court’s ruling, explaining that the full amount billed was a fictitious number which bore no relationship to the amount actually paid to satisfy the bill. Only the amount accepted as full payment for past medical expenses is recoverable, and therefore those values are also relevant and admissible. The reverse is also true: since the full billed amount is not recoverable, that amount is not relevant and thus not admissible at trial.
The court expanded its reasoning to future medical expenses. It explained that admitting evidence of the amounts paid for past medical expenses while allowing the full billed amounts to evaluate future medical expenses would only serve to confuse the jury and suggest the existence of collateral source payments, which is contrary to the collateral source rule. Since there was no relationship to the past amounts billed and the value of future medical expenses, evidence of the amounts billed are also irrelevant for evaluations of future medical expenses, and similarly inadmissible.
The court also extinguished any possibility of using an expert to circumvent the inadmissibility of the full billed amounts of medical expenses to evaluate future medical expenses. Some plaintiffs may have their experts use evidence of the amounts billed to reach their opinion about the reasonable cost of future medical expenses. The court explained that an expert’s opinion must be based on matters which provide a reasonable basis for the opinion offered; opinions based on sheer conjecture or speculation are inadmissible. Expert opinions formed by evaluating the full amounts billed for past medical expenses are formed with no reasonable basis to support the opinion, and thus are irrelevant and inadmissible.
As for noneconomic damages, the court noted that these awards are not easily calculated like economic damages. Juries are tasked with the difficult position of placing monetary value on something which cannot be quantified. At best, these awards are arbitrary allowances. Without analyzing the rationale behind it, the court noted that lawyers have long used economic damages as a launching point for the determination of noneconomic damages. There is no justification for allowing the jury to rely on otherwise inadmissible evidence, like the full billed amounts of medical expenses, to determine noneconomic damages.
Corenbaum will affect all cases where medical expenses are at issue. Our attorneys would be happy to assess your litigation strategy in light of Corenbaum, and discuss how it may affect the total value of your case.
