|
The current state of Missouri's workers' compensation law only got more confusing recently after another court decision was handed down.
The Eastern District of the Missouri Court of Appeals decided that the reasoning of a previous decision of its colleagues in the Southern District was erroneous, and, in a rare move, automatically transferred the case before it to the Missouri Supreme Court, to, in effect, break the tie between the lower courts.
In Johme v. St. John's Mercy Healthcare (ED96497), the claimant fell while making coffee. Although it determined that Johme's actions were not a function of her employment as a billing representative, the court declined to limit its holding to that basis. The court also determined that her injury occurred while she was engaged in a task that was primarily for her personal comfort, and that those type of claims had been eliminated by 2005 legislative amendments to Missouri's workers' compensation law.
Believing that its decision was fundamentally contrary to the 2010 decision of the Southern District in Pile v. Lake Regional Health Systems, (321 S.W.3d 463), the Eastern District (as it had before in Miller v. Mo Hwy & Transp. Comm'n, ED91971) took the unusual action of exercising its power to transfer the appeal directly to the Missouri Supreme Court to review its reasoning.
The Johme court disagreed with the Pile court that the strict construction of the Workers' Compensation Law now required since the 2005 amendments mandates a two-step process to review questions of compensability such as those in Johme and Pile, a nurse who was injured while getting medications for a patient. In Pile, the Southern District reasoned that the 2005 amendments effected changes only as to injuries occurring during activities that had no connection, or "nexus" to the claimant's necessary work duties. The Eastern District pronounced that analysis as not logical, and transferred the case to the Supreme Court with little further discussion of its reasoning.
Thus, the fallout from the 2005 changes to Missouri's workers' (or workman's) compensation system continues to spread. As I have discussed in previous KorteLaw blogs, Missouri courts applying strict construction to The Law have reached decision after decision which, like Johme, spell potential disaster for Missouri employers. The Missouri Supreme Court has already ruled that claimants like Johme who are excluded from the workers' comp system may file lawsuits for their injuries, including claims for pain and suffering, with potential recoveries that are not subject to the artificial monetary caps imposed by the work comp process.
Having been forced by the Eastern District to, in effect, re-consider its earlier decision to not review Pile, the Supreme Court will now be asked once again to clean up the mess created by the Missouri legislature's apparently poorly-drafted 2005 reform of workers' compensation. Although the court might be expected to take action consistent with its previous refusal to review the the analysis in Pile, such an outcome is by no means predictable, much less guaranteed. In the meantime, Missouri employers and injured workers will continue to lurch along in the detritus left in the wake of the legisature's meddling. |
