Gallagher v Mercy Medical, a new malpractice case handed down this week by the Maryland Court of Appeals,  is the most recent decision from our high court in which a plaintiff’s medical malpractice claims against Mercy Hospital were barred under the “one satisfaction” rule. This rule makes it tough to bring both an auto tort and a medical malpractice case related to the same accident.  If you are handling car accidents cases and there might be a malpractice element to it, you want to read this case (or at least this blog post). The law here his not intuitive because it leads to something the law should not — injustice.

In short, the malpractice claims against Mercy related to treatment for injuries the plaintiff sustained in an auto accident. The plaintiff had already sued the at-fault driver and received settlements from his insurer and a UIM settlement from her own insurance company.

The Court of Appeals held that the settlements from the auto tort action constituted “full satisfaction” for plaintiff’s alleged injuries and, therefore, her subsequent malpractice claims for those injuries were barred by the one satisfaction rule.

The Michigan Supreme Court came out a few weeks ago with a very interesting opinion in favor of the Plaintiff in a malpractice claim that most likely would fail in Maryland.

The doctor’s malpractice attorneys argued that the allegation that the doctor’s negligence caused a reduction in the risk of stroke from 10 to 20 percent to less than 5 to 10 percent was not enough to get the claim to a jury because the loss was not sufficient to meet the burden of proof on proximate causation. The doctor argued that Michigan law is whether the opportunity to achieve a better result was greater than 50 percent. Under this law, if the plaintiff could not prove that receiving the alleged appropriate treatment would have decreased his risk of injury by 50%, the plaintiff’s claim would fail.

Thankfully, a divided Michigan high court found that this is not the law and that malpractice cases such as this should be decided under a simple principle: the plaintiff is required to prove that the doctor’s negligence more probably than not caused the plaintiff’s injury.

Regrettably, Maryland goes in a different direction on these types of cases as I have previously discussed. One thing Maryland has Michigan beat on is collegiality among the judges on the court. Battles in the Michigan Supreme Court are both political and personal in a way that would shock Maryland lawyers. Judges quoting political statements made by other judges to the press, the judge that wrote the majority opinion writing separately to refute one judge’s personal attack – if you have no interest in this issue it is worth reading the opinion just to get a taste of what this different world is like.

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