Cutting Class: California Health Provider Overcomes Class Action Treatment of Patient Billing Claims

In a decision that is good news for California hospitals, the California Court of Appeal invalidated class certification when a San Diego-based hospital system proved that the only way to determine the members of an uninsured patient class was to review more than 120,000 patient records. In Hale v. Sharp Healthcare, the California Court of Appeal, Fourth Appellate District affirmed the trial court’s order decertifying a class of uninsured patients claiming unfair billing practices. In its decision filed November 19, 2014, and certified for publication on December 5, 2014, the Hale Court not only found Sharp Healthcare (Sharp) persuasively showed that a patient class could not be reasonably ascertained, but also that the billing practices applied to the uninsured patients varied such that diverse individual, rather than common, issues prevailed.

* This article was originally published in the Health Care Counsel blog. To read it in its entirety, click here.