Baltimore Transit Co. v. Harroll

• Decision Date: 26 May 1958
• Docket Number: No. 243,243
• Citation: 217 Md. 169,141 A.2d 912
• Parties: The BALTIMORE TRANSIT COMPANY v. James R. HARROLL.
• Court: Maryland Court of Appeals

Page 169

217 Md. 169

141 A.2d 912

The BALTIMORE TRANSIT COMPANY v. James R. HARROLL.

No. 243.

Court of Appeals of Maryland.

May 26, 1958.

James J. Doyle, Jr., Baltimore (Theodore Sherbow and Sherbow & Sherbow, Baltimore, on the brief), for appellant.

Bernard W. Rubenstein, Baltimore, for appellee.

Before BRUNE, Chief Judge, and HENDERSON, HAMMOND, PRESCOTT and HORNEY, JJ.

HAMMOND, J.

We are called upon to determine the true relationship between an agreement by an employer to furnish medical care to injured or sick employees and certain provisions of the Workmen's Compensation Act. The Baltimore Transit Company and the union representing its employees entered into a collective bargaining agreement. Article 17 of the agreement provided inter alia that the company would furnish the services of physicians and surgeons if an employee elected to avail himself of them, and if an employee resided where company doctors did not practice, the company would pay a stipulated fee to any doctor used. If surgery was indicated, a company surgeon must be used. If the employee required hospitalization, the company was to pay specified ward rates, for operations and the cost of any necessary or customary hospital services.

The appellee Harroll, who had worked for the company for many years, was injured while driving one of its buses because of the negligence of a third person. The family doctor called in Dr. Walter Wise, head surgeon of Mercy Hospital, and Harroll was admitted to that hospital for treatment. After he was discharged from the hospital, he applied for and received workmen's compensation payments from the insurance carrier of the company. Claim was made against the negligent third person, a settlement was reached, and the insurance carrier was repaid the compensation it had paid Harroll, and $423.70, the amount of the hospital and doctors' bills it had paid.

Harroll filed suit against the company for the recovery of the $423.70. He conceded below, as he did here, that payment of the medical and hospital expenses by the company's insurance carrier was payment by the company, but argued that any reimbursement from the tortfeasor belonged to him and not to the Company. Judge Mason, hearing the case without a jury, held that Harroll's rights and the company's liability were as '* * * in a case not growing out of compensation disability' and gave judgment for Harroll.

The company concedes that Dr. Wise is a company surgeon and that Mercy Hospital rates are payable if the contract is applicable, but it argues that Article 17 does not apply to cases of compensable injury. It sought to prove that the established practice before and since the collective bargaining agreement was to treat compensation cases by procedures completely different from cases of injury not arising in the course of employment and cases of sickness, in that the former were handled by one department and both of the latter by another. It proffered evidence that the collective bargaining agreement was intended to embody the existing practices.

Harroll, although expressly conceding that the company need not furnish hospital and medical care twice--that is, both under the compensation act and under the contract--argues earnestly that the payments made in his case were made under the contract and that the company had no right of subrogation to recoup them. He says that the words of the agreement are plain and unambiguous, that intent must be gathered solely from those words, that the agreement applies to cases of injury arising out of employment so that in such cases payment of hospital and medical expenses is by virtue of the contract, and that the coverage of the agreement is analogous to that of accident and health policies, which do not merely indemnify but are investment policies which permit both retention of payments made under them and recovery of damages from the negligent third person who brought about the injury. Harroll finds support for his argument that the contract requires payment of hospital and medical expenses in compensation cases in the absence from that part of Article 17 that deals with the obligation to furnish such services of any qualifications or limitations whatever, while in other sections of the same article it is provided that death benefits are not to be paid in cases in which a claim for damages or compensation is asserted against the company under present or future law, and in still another that employees or pensioners who have hospitalization insurance must apply the insurance proceeds towards payment of hospital expenses, as far as they will go. In effect, Harroll says the company, in the instant case, did not pay the hospital and medical expenses as it had expressly agreed it would, because it obtained reimbursement from the tortfeasor and, therefore, it must pay, and he is the payee under the agreement.

There are significant indications that Article 17 of the agreement was to complement the compensation act and not to supplement or supplant it in any respect. It would be entirely competent for the parties by express contract to supplement the benefits under the Act or to relax its restrictions or requirements in favor of the employees. 2 Larson, Workmen's Compensation Law, Sec. 97.61; Sharp v. Foley Brothers, Sup., 69 N.Y.S.2d 514. However, in the provisions of Article 17, dealing with the furnishing of hospitalization and medical treatment, there is nothing to indicate that the parties were doing more than to make applicable to non-compensable injuries and to sicknesses most of the obligations the law imposed on the company in favor of the employees in cases of compensable injury. Code 1957, Art. 101, Sec. 37(a), in force when the agreement was signed, provides that in addition to the compensation provided by the Act, '* * * the employer shall promptly provide for an injured employee such medical, surgical or other attendance or treatment, nurse and hospital services, medicines * * * as may be required by the Commission.' The provisions of Article 17 of the agreement do not refer to the compensation law, but the parties must be deemed to have entered into the contract with knowledge of its requirements and it would seem that the company was agreeing to do something more than it was already legally obligated to do, that it, to provide hospitalization and medical care for non-compensable injury and for sickness. Other provisions of Article 17 of the agreement lend support to this conclusion. It is...