What kind of care did Lauree Ellison receive at Baptist Health and what led to the Alabama Supreme Court ruling? Here is how the Montgomery Advertiser described it:
The hospital had appealed a 2009 Montgomery County jury's verdict that Baptist Health was negligent when it failed to notify 73-year-old Lauree Ellison or her physician that a throat culture had come back positive for Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA). The culture was done during a visit to the Baptist Medical Center East emergency room in September of 2005.
About two months later, Ellison was re-admitted to Baptist Medical Center East and diagnosed as having MRSA Pneumonia. She died five days later. The hospital contends that she actually died of congestive heart failure.
But the Alabama Supreme Court said that regardless of the cause, the hospital could not be sued because it had governmental immunity through its relationship to the University of Alabama and the University of Alabama at Birmingham Health System.
Citizens might want to think about that the next time they seek health care at UAB. In fact, citizens might want to think about that before conducting any business at UAB--or even setting foot on the campus. As I've seen from personal experience in my ongoing employment lawsuit, the university has a tendency to cause harm and then try to hide behind the skirt of immunity.
If the law is applied correctly, UAB and other state entities often cannot get away with such legal shenanigans. But UAB and its corporate affiliates have judicial "protectors" in both state and federal courts in Alabama, and if regular folks are harmed (or even killed) because of it . . . well, the administrators who currently are running UAB into the ground don't much care.
Lengthy treatises have been written on state immunity, also known as "sovereign immunity" or "Eleventh Amendment immunity," and we won't go into too much detail on a controversial and complicated topic. The basic idea is that private individuals cannot sue for damages that would be paid from a state treasury. A number of exceptions exist to state immunity, but Bolin found that they did not apply in the Davis case, even though Baptist Health clearly is not a state entity and did not even assert an immunity defense at trial.
Chief Justice Sue Bell Cobb expressed concern about Bolin's opinion and what it could mean to Alabama citizens:
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