ATTORNEY: JENNIFER BANNER SOBERS
Pomerantz Monitor, July/August 2013
Ten days before the American Express decision, the Supreme Court, in a case involving the Oxford health insurance company, unanimously affirmed an arbitrator’s decision to authorize class arbitration. He held that because the arbitration agreement stated that “all disputes” must be submitted to arbitration -- without specifically saying whether “all disputes” includes class actions -- nonetheless the agreement means that class action disputes can be arbitrated.
This case was filed in court by a pediatrician in the Oxford “network” who alleged that Oxford failed to fully and promptly pay him and other physicians with similar Oxford contracts. The court granted Oxford’s demand that the case be arbitrated. The parties then agreed that the arbitrator should decide whether the contract authorized class arbitration. In finding that the contract did permit class arbitrations, the arbitrator focused on the language of the arbitration clause, which stated that “all” civil actions must be submitted to arbitration. Oxford tried to vacate the arbitrator’s decision, claiming that he exceeded his powers under the Federal Arbitration Act. The District Court denied the motion, and the Third Circuit affirmed.
In agreeing with the lower courts, the Supreme Court held that when an arbitrator interprets an arbitration agreement, that determination must be upheld so long as he was really construing the contract. Whether this interpretation is correct is beside the point, as far as the courts are concerned. Judicial review of arbitrators’ decisions is far more constrained than the review of lower court decisions.
This case may turn out to be the silver lining to the Supreme Court’s series of rulings curtailing class actions in arbitration. This decision will specifically benefit plaintiffs, including those, like the plaintiff here, whose claims lie in the health care arena.
Moreover, the decision seems to narrow the effect of the court’s previous decision in 2010, which held that “silence” in an arbitration agreement usually means that the parties did not agree to arbitrate on a class-wide basis. To the extent that arbitrators in future cases interpret an agreement to arbitrate “all disputes” as including class-wide disputes, plaintiffs will be more likely in the future to have a realistic chance to have their claims resolved. That is, unless there is an explicit class action waiver.
Many consumers are subject to arbitration agreements, including physicians who often have no choice but to accept such agreements if they want to be in-network providers for insurers. As Pomerantz and co-counsel argued in an amicus brief on behalf of the American Medical Association and the Medical Society of New Jersey in support of the pediatrician, without being able to arbitrate on a class-wide basis, physicians will have no effective means by which to enforce their contracts with insurers and challenge underpayments. The typical claim by a doctor against an insurer is relatively small. Prosecuting such small claims in individual arbitration is impossible, given that the cost of bringing an arbitration will almost always exceed the amount an individual doctor could potentially recover through arbitration. Moreover, individual arbitrations could not adequately address certain pervasive wrongful practices by insurers such as underpayment or delayed payment of claims and do not provide injunctive relief to stop such practices – a critical remedy sought in many class actions.