The Plastic Surgery Center, PA v. Malouf Chevrolet-Cadillac, Inc., 457 N.J. Super. 565 (App. Div. 2019). This opinion today by Judge Fisher was so legal issue-intensive that he found that the factual “details of these cases need not clutter [his] opinion.” In short, these consolidated cases involved the effect on a statute of limitations of a 2012 amendment to N.J.S.A. 34:15-15.
The amendment declared that “[e]xclusive jurisdiction for any disputed medical charge arising from any claim for compensation for a work-related injury or illness shall be vested in the [D]ivision [of Workers’ Compensation].” Previously, providers of medical services to injured persons who were pursuing workers’ compensation claims in the Division could be litigated in court, with no need for providers to participate in the Division proceedings. The 2012 amendment changed that.
A Workers’ Compensation judge found in each case that the two-year statute applied. Today, the Appellate Division reversed that ruling.
Judge Fisher began by noting that the best indicator of legislative intent is the statutory language. Here, all parties agreed that the 2012 amendment was silent about timeliness issues. “Instead, the participants offer only their surmisals of what they believe the Legislature’s silence meant.”
Judge Fisher found that the Legislature’s silence showed that it meant to leave things as they had been. “[T]he fact that the Legislature did not simply express that the Act’s two-year time bar would apply to medical-provider claims is alone persuasive of its more likely intent to leave things as they were. It was well-established long before the 2012 amendment that the timeliness of medical-provider claims was governed by the general six-year statute of limitations.” The Legislature must have known that, but it did nothing to say directly that it was changing that state of affairs.
The parties debated a bit of legislative history, involving language directing the Division to provide procedures for medical provider disputes. That language was ultimately not adopted. That too showed that the Legislature intended no change to the statute of limitations.
“[M]ost obvious, [was] the fact that the Legislature made no alteration to N.J.S.A. 34:15-51 when it amended N.J.S.A. 34:15-15. Respondents, and amici who line up on their side, believe the Legislature intended to incorporate medical providers into the existing claimant-for-compensation category of N.J.S.A. 34:15-51 without saying so.” That view was untenable, because the category of “claimant” was always understood to mean “employee,” and other sections of the act equate the two terms.
Finally, the argument for reducing the limitations period to two years of “the accident” did not fit the claims of medical providers. Their claims are not dependent on the date of any accident. Thus, “the idea that the timeliness of a medical-provider’s claim should be gauged by the passage of time from the employee’s accident seems nonsensical.”