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Sat, 3 Feb 1996 13:56:17 -0500 |
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If the lawsuit you are referring to is the one that Pris Bornmann and I were
working on, I can tell you what happened. The mom was really not interested in
suing the hospital; she just wanted to refuse to pay the co-pay on the grounds
that she didn't get the services she was being asked to pay for. The hospital
did sue her in small claims, and Pris spoke to the hospital's lawyer just to
let them know that there was a lawyer representing the patient and that there
were substantive defenses to the claim. At the first call of the case, the
court dismissed the suit for failure to serve process correctly on the mother.
The hospital (in the three months since that happened) has not made any further
attempts to collect the debt. I think that the suit is over now, mainly
because the hospital made a cost/benefit judgment that the legal expenses of
pursuing this patient weren't worth the amount of the potential recovery.
As an aside: this mother might have had a very good claim for "battery" -- that
is, an unconsented to touching of her baby with the bottle -- except that it
was barred by the statute of limitations. Battery is an intentional wrong, and
as such, has a shorter time limit (usually 1 year) than negligence, which is
the usual basis for a medical malpractice claim.
J. Rachael Hamlet
Owner, Lactivist Mailing List
Author, The Breastfeeding Advocacy Page
http://www.clark.net/pub/activist/bfpage/bfpage.html
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