« Environment - Yet more on "Great Lakes Compact on track"[Updated] | Main | Ind. Decisions - Court of Appeals issues 6 today (and 12 NFP) »
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Ind. Decisions - 7th Circuit decides one Indiana case today
In Kentuckiana Healthcare v. Fourth Street Solutions (SD Ind., Judge Hamilton), a 7-page opinion, Judge Posner affirms the district court decision:
After the substitution of Fourth Street Solutions for Kentuckiana, Scott County Nursing & Wellness Center (SCNW) continued for a time to receive Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements for services that Kentuckiana had performed when it managed the health care facility. (Kentuckiana had been deemed the provider of the services and so had billed the government directly for them.) But SCNW failed to forward the reimbursements to Kentuckiana, which brought this suit to recover them. Initially it named SCNW as a defendant, but SCNW declared bankruptcy and Kentuckiana was unable to obtain any money from the bankrupt estate. It contends that the remaining defendants converted that reimbursement money and must therefore make Kentuckiana’s loss good. The district court granted summary judgment for the defendants. * * *[T]here is a difference between a duty to render property in your control to one whom you know to be the true owner entitled to immediate possession, even if you are an agent of someone else, and a duty to assist in the return to the true owner of property that is not in your control. The Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements that Kentuckiana should have received were paid to SCNW and deposited in its bank accounts. Because Dugan and Ross had signing authority, they could have written a check to Kentuckiana. But they were not the recipients of the reimbursements. SCNW was. You do not convert someone’s property by failing to save it, unless you have a duty to do so; there is no general liability for failing to be a Good Samaritan even when you could save a person’s life at no risk or other cost to yourself. * * *
So the conversion claim fails, and while Kentuckiana also argues that the defendants should be treated as constructive trustees of the reimbursements, that they breached fiduciary duties to it, and that they were negligent in failing to transfer the reimbursements to it, it admits that these alternative formulations of its claim are all premised on the assumption that the reimbursements were property of Kentuckiana that the defendants controlled. They were property of Kentuckiana, all right, but the defendants did not control it, and so these claims fall with the conversion claim. AFFIRMED
Posted by Marcia Oddi on February 19, 2008 01:20 PM
Posted to Indiana Courts