{"id":10,"date":"2026-09-02T21:15:29","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T21:15:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/floridahellthcare.com\/?page_id=10"},"modified":"2026-09-02T21:15:29","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T21:15:29","slug":"history","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/floridahellthcare.com\/?page_id=10","title":{"rendered":"History"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reading rule:<\/strong> This timeline separates enacted law, judicial holdings, executive action, and developing research. It does not turn an advocacy theory into a court holding.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
1968<\/div>\n
\n

Survival law<\/h3>\n

Florida\u2019s survival statute provided that causes of action survive the death of the person entitled or liable, subject to the law\u2019s terms. This is part of the baseline for later merger analysis.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
1972<\/div>\n
\n

Modern Wrongful Death Act<\/h3>\n

Florida enacted a comprehensive act declaring a policy of shifting wrongful-death losses from survivors to the wrongdoer and routing the action through a personal representative.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
1973<\/div>\n
\n

Kluger v. White<\/em><\/h3>\n

The Florida Supreme Court articulated the access-to-courts test used when legislation abolishes a preexisting right without a reasonable alternative: overpowering public necessity and no alternative method.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
1974\u201375<\/div>\n
\n

Medical-malpractice reform and repose<\/h3>\n

Florida acted amid a fast-moving insurance crisis. The resulting framework included an outside time bar and multiple insurance, screening, disciplinary, and study mechanisms. The project is reconstructing which alternatives were known, adopted, temporary, repealed, or later obscured.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
1975<\/div>\n
\n

Martin v. United Security Services<\/em><\/h3>\n

The Court held that when a personal injury causes death, the personal-injury action does not continue as a separate survival action; the recoverable elements are pursued through the Wrongful Death Act.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
1989<\/div>\n
\n

Carr v. Broward County<\/em><\/h3>\n

The Court upheld medical-malpractice repose against an Article I, \u00a7 21 challenge, relying on the announced 1975 crisis and concluding that no less stringent measure would solve the identified problem. Whether later evidence and alternatives alter that predicate is a research and litigation question\u2014not an existing overruling of Carr<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
1990<\/div>\n
\n

Chapter 90-14 and \u00a7 768.21(8)<\/h3>\n

The same legislation that expanded specified noneconomic recovery for adult-family survivors in general wrongful-death cases withheld those damages when the claim was medical negligence. Committee discussion framed the underlying expansion in terms of equity and fairness, while the medical exclusion became the line now disputed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
2000<\/div>\n
\n

Mizrahi<\/em> upholds the exclusion<\/h3>\n

The Florida Supreme Court held that the medical-negligence classification survived rational-basis equal-protection review, relying on controlling health-care and malpractice-insurance costs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
2014<\/div>\n
\n

Estate of McCall<\/em><\/h3>\n

The Court invalidated statutory caps on noneconomic damages in medical-malpractice wrongful-death cases. The opinions examined the evidence for the asserted malpractice crisis and the constitutional danger of allowing emergency predicates to become permanent.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
2017<\/div>\n
\n

Kalitan<\/em><\/h3>\n

The Court extended the equal-protection analysis to medical-malpractice personal-injury caps.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
2019<\/div>\n
\n

Santiago v. Rodriguez<\/em><\/h3>\n

The Second District recognized it remained bound by Mizrahi<\/em> even if later Supreme Court reasoning called its rationale into question, and certified whether \u00a7 768.21(8) remained constitutional after McCall<\/em> and Kalitan<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
2025<\/div>\n
\n

Repeal passes, then is vetoed<\/h3>\n

HB 6017 passed the House 104\u20136 and the Senate 33\u20134. Governor Ron DeSantis vetoed it on May 29, 2025. The statutory exclusion remained in force.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
2026<\/div>\n
\n

Repeal returns but does not become law<\/h3>\n

HB 6003 died in Senate Rules on March 13, 2026; identical SB 1700 died in Senate Judiciary. On June 18, 2026, the House transmitted the 2025 veto message to the Secretary of State. No repeal became law.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

What the repose research is testing<\/h2>\n

Carr<\/em> did not declare repose intrinsically constitutional in every future factual setting. Its reasoning accepted a specific crisis and the proposition that a sufficiently effective alternative was unavailable. The developing research therefore asks:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. What did regulators and lawmakers actually know about carrier concentration, rate filings, claims-made coverage, pooling, reinsurance, self-insurance, and mandatory coverage?<\/li>\n
  2. Which parts of the 1975 package were intended to study or reduce the incidence of malpractice, and what did the resulting reports conclude?<\/li>\n
  3. Did later insurance mechanisms address long-tail uncertainty more directly than extinguishing patient claims?<\/li>\n
  4. Can an old emergency predicate remain conclusive after the factual conditions change?<\/li>\n
  5. Does repose take on a different constitutional character when another statute made the underlying case economically or procedurally inaccessible before time expired?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Current status<\/h2>\n

    As of September 2, 2026, both \u00a7 768.21(8) and the medical-malpractice timing provisions of \u00a7 95.11 remain in force. The constitutional and historical propositions discussed here are arguments for research, legislation, and adjudication; they are not a declaration that a court has already invalidated either provision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The legislative, executive, and judicial history from the Wrongful Death Act through the 2026 session.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-10","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/floridahellthcare.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/floridahellthcare.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/floridahellthcare.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/floridahellthcare.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/floridahellthcare.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/floridahellthcare.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/floridahellthcare.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}