Supreme Court to Evaluate Discrimination Lawsuit by Blind Patients Against Leading Lab Company
A federal court determined in May 2022 that the class action lawsuit against Labcorp can move forward.
The U.S. Supreme Court is set to decide whether a group of blind individuals can take legal action against LabCorp for discrimination due to the inaccessibility of the company’s newly implemented self-service check-in kiosks.
The petitioner operates under the name LabCorp, while the respondents include blind patients of LabCorp, specifically Luke Davis and Julian Vargas.
The company launched self-service kiosks in its patient service centers; however, blind individuals found them inaccessible without assistance.
To improve accessibility for blind patients, “LabCorp simultaneously enhanced its front-desk services—adopting the same ‘express’ technology utilized in its kiosks—to provide a similarly convenient check-in option for visually impaired patients.”
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In 2020, a collective of legally blind individuals filed a proposed class action lawsuit, asserting that the kiosks violated the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) as well as California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act.
In a class action, one or more individuals sue on behalf of a “class,” or a larger group asserting they have experienced similar injuries due to a defendant’s actions. Protocols in federal and state courts determine whether a class action is eligible for certification and can proceed.
LabCorp argues that not all blind individuals in the class suffered actual injuries resulting from the company’s regulations.
The Supreme Court’s order indicates it will evaluate whether federal procedural rules permit a federal court to certify a class action “when certain members of the proposed class lack any Article III injury.”
Article III of the U.S. Constitution regulates federal courts and has been interpreted to state that these courts can only address actual disputes wherein at least one party has the standing to sue.
Standing signifies the capacity of a person to initiate a lawsuit. The involved parties must demonstrate a sufficiently strong connection to the claim to justify their participation in the legal action.
LabCorp stated in the petition that “it is significantly challenging to identify blind patients who have actually suffered harm due to the presence of LabCorp’s new kiosks.”
Many blind patients “either are unaware of these kiosks or, even if they are, show no interest in using them, preferring the long-standing front-desk option.”
Furthermore, the opposing side could not identify any patients who were denied access to LabCorp’s services because they could not use a kiosk, as mentioned in the petition.
The plaintiffs in the initial lawsuit characterized the proposed classes as including “all blind patients who had merely encountered these allegedly inaccessible kiosks—namely, blind patients who entered a [patient service center] with a kiosk, regardless of their awareness or desire to use it.”
According to the plaintiffs, this could amount to hundreds of thousands of individuals and potentially lead to damages nearing half a billion dollars annually, as stated in the petition.
In May 2022, a federal district court certified two classes in this lawsuit. One class comprised patients in California seeking damages under the Unruh Act; the other included patients nationwide seeking relief under the ADA as well as two other federal laws—the Rehabilitation Act and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to as the Obamacare law.
The company has requested the Supreme Court to accept the petition, arguing that federal appellate courts are divided on the actions to take when some class members lack any injury as per Article III. Moreover, the case “involves billions of dollars.”
They pointed out that the lower courts did not conclude that a class containing uninjured members could be certified. Instead, the courts established “that each member of the certified classes asserted they had encountered a common injury, and that ‘all class members were harmed by the utter inaccessibility of LabCorp kiosks for blind individuals.’”
The Ninth Circuit reached the correct conclusion in stating “that all class members experienced adverse treatment from Labcorp due to their disability,” the brief claimed.
The Epoch Times has reached out for comments to Labcorp’s attorney, Noel Francisco of Jones Day in Washington, as well as the respondents’ attorneys, Benjamin Sweet of Nye, Stirling, Hale, Miller, and Sweet in Pittsburgh, and Nicolas Sansone of the Public Citizen Litigation Group in Washington. No responses were received prior to publication.
