Kramer v. Lewisville Memorial Hospital

Summary

The Supreme Court of Texas held that Texas law does not permit recovery for a lost chance of survival or cure in medical malpractice cases when the plaintiff cannot establish that the negligence more likely than not caused the ultimate harm. The court concluded that neither the Texas Wrongful Death Act nor the Survivorship Statute authorized the asserted claims, and it declined to recognize a separate common-law cause of action. The court affirmed the court of appeals' judgment upholding a take-nothing judgment for Lewisville Memorial Hospital.

Holdings

1. The Texas Wrongful Death Act does not authorize recovery for a negligent deprivation of a less-than-even chance of survival because it permits recovery only for an injury that causes death, not for an injury that merely reduces the probability of avoiding death.
2. The Texas Survivorship Statute does not independently authorize loss-of-chance recovery because it preserves an existing cause of action but does not create a new one.
3. Texas does not adopt the loss-of-chance doctrine as part of its common law in medical-malpractice cases.
4. Traditional Texas causation principles bar recovery when negligence deprived the patient of only a 50 percent or less chance of avoiding the ultimate harm.
5. The plaintiffs waived any objection to the verification of the Hospital's supplemental interrogatory answers by waiting until trial to object and by introducing portions of the depositions of two of the witnesses during their own case.
6. Even assuming the trial court erred in admitting the challenged testimony, the error did not require reversal because it was not calculated to cause the rendition of an improper judgment.

Questions Presented

1. Whether Texas law permits recovery for a less-than-even lost chance of survival or cure in a medical-malpractice action.
2. Whether the Texas Wrongful Death Act authorizes recovery for injuries that reduce a patient's chance of avoiding death but probably did not cause the death.
3. Whether the Texas Survivorship Statute or a separate Texas common-law cause of action permits recovery for loss of chance.
4. Whether the Hospital's supplemental interrogatory answers were invalidly verified and required exclusion of defense witnesses.
5. Whether the trial court's admission of testimony concerning an informal experiment by cytotechnologists required reversal.

Disposition

affirmed