WILLIAMS v. REGENCY HOSPITAL COMPANY, LLC

After her mother Michelle Hewett suffered a stroke and was left permanently disabled, Andreana Williams became her conservator and later sued Regency Hospital and one of its nurses for medical malpractice, claiming Hewett's tongue injury was mishandled during her care. Williams filed suit more than two years after the treatment, arguing the deadline should have been paused because Hewett was mentally incompetent at the time. A Georgia statute says that pause does not apply to medical malpractice cases, even though it applies in other types of lawsuits. Williams argued this special rule violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Both the trial court and the Court of Appeals of Georgia ruled against her, pointing to a 2010 Supreme Court of Georgia case, Deen v. Stevens, that had already upheld the same law. The Supreme Court of Georgia agreed, finding Deen controls and that Williams's additional arguments, including one about a separate expert-affidavit requirement, did not show the law lacks a rational basis.

The court held that Georgia's law excluding medical malpractice claims from the usual pause in deadlines for mentally incompetent plaintiffs survives rational-basis review because it is rationally related to the legislature's goals of controlling healthcare costs and preventing stale lawsuits, and that this issue was already settled by Deen v. Stevens.

The ruling confirms that Georgia patients who are mentally incompetent, and their families or conservators, must still sue over medical malpractice within two years of the treatment, even though people with similar disabilities get extra time in other types of lawsuits. This affects how quickly guardians must act to preserve malpractice claims.

Affirmed

1. The court applied rational-basis review, the lenient constitutional test asking only whether a reasonably conceivable set of facts could justify treating two groups differently, because mental incompetence is not a suspect classification requiring stricter scrutiny.
2. The court found that Deen v. Stevens, a 2010 case rejecting a similar equal-protection challenge to the same non-tolling statute, is essentially indistinguishable because it already analyzed the statute's treatment of mentally incompetent plaintiffs specifically in the medical malpractice context.
3. The court rejected Williams's argument that studies showing malpractice suits have only a 'largely theoretical' effect on healthcare costs undermine the law, noting Deen already declined to second-guess this policy debate and left such judgments to the legislature.
4. The court considered Williams's new argument that a separate law requiring expert affidavits in malpractice suits (O.C.G.A. § 9-11-9.1) makes the non-tolling rule unnecessary, but concluded the legislature may pursue multiple, incremental approaches to the same problem without any one becoming irrational.
5. Because Williams did not raise before the trial court her argument that mentally incompetent people should be treated as a protected class, the court declined to consider that argument for the first time on appeal.
6. Having found no basis to depart from Deen and no merit in the additional arguments, the court concluded Williams failed to meet her burden of proving the statute unconstitutional.

• statute of limitations
• equal protection
• medical malpractice
• mental incompetence
• tolling