Hospital Negligence Class Action Remanded to Louisiana State Court

Preston v. Tenet Healthsystem Memorial Medical Center, Inc., 463 F. Supp. 2d 583 (E.D. La. Nov. 21, 2006)

Kathryn L. Burgess, 2L, University of Mississippi School of Law

Background
After Hurricane Katrina hit, the conditions at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans rapidly deteriorated. The hospital lost electrical power and the temperatures inside rose to over one hundred degrees. Sanitation systems backed up. When the levees broke, more than one thousand people were trapped inside the hospital as a result of the eight-foot-high flood waters. Teams used helicopters and boats to perform rescues, but some of the most vulnerable patients remained trapped inside, and an estimated thirty-five patients died during the crisis.

In October, relatives of the deceased and injured patients filed a lawsuit in federal district court against Memorial Medical Center and LifeCare Management Services, which operated an acute care unit inside the hospital. The plaintiffs also filed a class action suit asserting “various allegations of negligence and intentional misconduct” and reverse patient dumping under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act.1

Removal Claims
The plaintiffs filed a notice to remand the suit to state court, but later withdrew that request. Subsequently, Memorial resurrected the motion to remand. LifeCare filed a notice of removal to keep the case in federal court citing several bases for federal jurisdiction: (1) the Federal Officer Removal Statute; (2) the Multiparty, Multiforum Trial Jurisdiction Act; (3) the Class Action Fairness Act; and (4) the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act.2

The purpose of the Federal Officer Removal Statute is to “provide a federal forum in cases where federal officials are entitled to raise a defense arising out of their duties.”#3 Removal is only proper in the current case if LifeCare is a person that acted under color of federal authority when committing a tortious act and can assert a colorable defense. The court held that LifeCare failed to show that it acted under color of federal authority in failing to maintain hospital conditions and putting an evacuation plan in motion sufficient to keep its patients alive. No federal officer exercised “direct and detailed” control of the hospital at any time during the crisis.

The Multiparty, Multiforum Trial Jurisdiction Act creates original federal jurisdiction over “any civil action involving minimal diversity between adverse parties, where at least seventy-five natural persons have died in the accident at a discrete location and allows consolidation of cases relating to a common disaster.”4 Many courts have refused to consider Hurricane Katrina as an accident, although some have reserved judgment on whether the levee breaches are accidents. Regardless, seventy-five people were not killed at the hospital itself, which precludes federal jurisdiction.

The Class Action Fairness Act allows a defendant to move an action to federal court if the threshold amount in controversy and minimal diversity exist. Diversity of citizenship was at issue in this claim. The court held that the lack of diversity precluded the removal of the case, citing the nexus between the plaintiffs, the defendants, and the state of Louisiana. For instance, all of the injuries took place in New Orleans at a defined moment in time. Additionally, ninety-seven percent of the patients and the hospital are Louisiana citizens. Although there was a mass displacement of most of the residents after Katrina, many of them express a desire to remain citizens of the state of Louisiana.

Finally, the plaintiffs claimed that reverse patient dumping brought the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act into play. Reverse patient dumping refers to the claim that LifeCare evacuated some patients out of the hospital after the levees broke and abandoned others due to the lack of an effective evacuation plan. Under federal law, this is not a viable cause of action. The main purpose of the statute was to prevent doctors and hospitals from refusing to treat people who lacked the money to pay for medical treatment.

Conclusion
The court held that state law claims predominate over the issues in the case. The district court concluded that in its entirety, it lacked jurisdiction to hear the matter and remanded it to the Civil District Court for the Parish of Orleans.

Endnotes
1.  Preston v. Tenet Healthsystem Mem. Med. Ctr., Inc., U.S. Dist. LEXIS 85381 at *6 (E.D. La. Nov. 21, 2006).
2.  Id. at *9.
3.  Id. at *11.
4.  Id. at *19.