On August 23, 2024, the NAM asked the Utah Supreme Court to decline to extend the collateral source rule, an important legal principle in personal injury suits which prevents the admission of evidence that the plaintiff received compensation from a third party, such as an insurer, for the damages they are seeking against the defendant. In this case, a trial court relied on the collateral source rule to allow a plaintiff at trial to introduce into evidence the list price for the medical services he received after a rear-end car accident while preventing the defendant from introducing evidence of the amount charged and paid. The defendant appealed this decision to the Utah Supreme Court.
We argue in our amicus brief that list prices, the maximum charge a hospital sets for a service before any discounts are negotiated, neither reflect the reasonable value of medical care (because they are never paid) nor advance the goals of the collateral source rule—to ensure that a tortfeasor’s liability is not reduced when the injured person’s costs will be covered by third parties. Thus, states have increasingly precluded plaintiffs from recovering amounts above those actually paid and accepted for medical services to prevent grossly inflated awards for medical services rendered.