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Kiss v. Jacob12/14/1994
ery by plaintiffs. Thus, if a plaintiff received disability benefits, health insurance benefits, unemployment compensation, or other benefits after having established an injury, the benefits would be required to be deducted from the award. * * * To the extent that the injured party is being compensated for the same things from different sources there is double recovery on the part of the plaintiff. This bill, by requiring that the benefits received from the other sources be offset against the award, is intended to effect cost containment.
[Statement to Senate Bill No. 2708 (Nov. 23, 1987).]
The foregoing language suggests strongly that the Legislature's essential concern was with insurance-type benefits. The statute provides that when an award is reduced by the amount of benefits that a plaintiff has received, that reduction should be offset by "any premium paid to an insurer directly by the plaintiff, or by
any member of the plaintiff's family on behalf of the plaintiff for the policy period for which benefits are payable" -- terminology that is utterly foreign to tort settlements.
In addition, N.J.S.A. 2A:15-97 addresses only those benefits that "duplicate any benefit contained in the award." Settlements of personal-injury claims are conventionally in the form of lump-sum payments that are designed to ensure the settling party's peace from prosecution ever after of the plaintiff's claim, without reference to any break-down of that claim into discrete elements of medical expense, lost income, pain and suffering, permanent disability, and the like. The nonspecific nature of a settlement amount renders unreliable any Conclusion that the Legislature intended to include "settlements" in the meaning of the term "benefits" as used in the collateral-source statute.
Apart from the above, however, and of surpassing importance to our determination is the effect of the Appellate Division's decision on one of the basic principles of comparative negligence, namely, that "responsibility for a plaintiff's claimed injury is to be apportioned according to each party's relative degree of fault." Blazovic v. Andrich, 124 N.J. 90, 107, 590 A.2d 222 (1991).
When an alleged tortfeasor settles before trial, comparative-negligence rules would dictate the allocation of relative responsibility of the remaining defendants. Under N.J.S.A. 2A:15-5.2, the trier of fact would determine not only the full value of the personal-injury plaintiff's damages but also the extent, in the form of a percentage, of each party's causative negligence. Therefore, when a settling defendant is in the picture, the factfinder must assess the negligence of that defendant as well as of the non-settling defendant. "When one defendant settles, the remaining codefendant or codefendants are chargeable with the total verdict less that attributable to the settling defendant's percentage share." Cartel Capital Corp. v. Fireco of New Jersey, 81 N.J. 548, 569, 410 A.2d 674 (1980). The court in Rogers v. Spady, 147 N.J. Super. 274, 278, 371 A.2d 285 (App. Div. 1977), explained that
the result of the Comparative Negligence Law is that if plaintiff makes a particularly good bargain in settlement and the ultimate percentage of negligence found attributable to the settling defendant would have resulted in a judgment for less than the amount of settlement, plaintiff will benefit by the excess amount. * * * However, this is offset by the potential for a greater loss to plainti
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