Our View: Court of no appeal

Several years ago, arbitration was embraced as a way to make America’s court system more user-friendly – and user-friendliness is something the system clearly needed.

But the plan may have backfired in a consumer protection action now pending in Spokane County Superior Court. In the next week or two, a Spokane judge is expected to rule on whether an ambulance company can force the case into binding arbitration. If Judge Jerome Leveque says OK, the plaintiffs who are suing American Medical Response over excessive billings might face financial risks so great that it wouldn’t make sense to proceed, given the relatively small personal losses they suffered.

AMR, which has a monopoly on ambulance service in Spokane, has admitted overbilling hundreds of plaintiffs. The company’s own audit identified nearly 900 Spokane residents and an undetermined number of insurance companies who were overcharged for ambulance service by $320,689 since the beginning of 2003 when AMR’s current contract with the city took effect.

The plaintiffs – Lori E. Davis-Bailey and Lorraine and Doug Bacon – are trying to establish a class action suit covering thousands of Spokane residents served by AMR all the way back to 1998 when the national company entered its first five-year contract with the city.

AMR wants the matter referred to binding arbitration rather than tried before a jury in open court. That would cost the plaintiffs thousands of dollars in initial costs, including half of the arbitrator’s fee of up to $300 an hour. They might recover those costs if they win, but they might end up paying AMR’s costs if they lose. That’s a hideously high-stakes gamble on an overbilling of only about $100.

In addition to which, arbitration sends the matter behind closed doors where Spokane citizens will be in the dark about any explanations of why the city Fire Department failed to catch the problem before it got out of hand.

Arbitration? Litigation? Either way, it’s going to consume big sums, a lot of which will go to the legal professionals. It shouldn’t have to be that way, especially in a situation where the defendant concedes that patients transported in its ambulances were overcharged on a substantial scale.

A class-action suit is one way to simplify matters by bunching many small but related cases into one. Arbitration, without the prohibitive price tags, might be another.

Simpler still, why doesn’t AMR, having admitted extensive errors, just write out checks to make all the overbilled consumers whole? And where oh where is the city of Spokane in all this? It was the Fire Department, after all, that was supposed to be managing the AMR contract. It has a fiduciary responsibility to the citizens, but it allowed the erroneous billing practices to go undetected. The department failed the citizens, and it has a duty to make things right for the residents who suffered losses. To the degree allowed by law and the state constitution, the Fire Department should pay the plaintiffs’ share of the arbitration and pursue the maximum fines possible from AMR.

At least one thing seems clear. A justice system that makes private citizens incur an unconscionable risk to recover a valid claim still has some work to do on user-friendliness.